From: Carl Youngblood Date: 2005-01-08T01:52:04+09:00 Subject: Re: Slightly OT: Re: [BOUNTY] Shopping cart ... Sarah Tanembaum wrote: > In other word, it is a bit tedious to do it in Ruby, whereas in PHP > language(and its library) has more complete tools/utilities to do far > fun/interesting projects/excercise - which include shopping cart, > cataloging, content management, interactive database apps, etc... > > That is what I've been saying all along, but there are some reluctancy > amongs Rubyist to admit this issues. Perhaps if we realize this > problem, we can fix it and make Ruby the language of choice to do fun > and quite interesting projects. > > Just my 2cents .. I know what you are saying, and I myself would have agreed with you at one point in time, but you should also understand that PHP was designed first and foremost to be a language for web applications, so it has all the scaffolding necessary for these things by default. Many developers, however, do not want to write web applications, and don't want to have 20 megs worth of add-ons (such as apache and an rdbms) installed along with ruby. Your experience with PHP was probably easier because you downloaded one of the all-in-one setups of apache/php/mysql out there (such as XAMPP). If you had not, you would probably have just as much setup and configuration to do as you now have with a package like ruby on rails, which actually is quite smooth, especially if you use webrick instead of apache and perhaps some lightweight database like sqlite. It will be even easier when Curt finished his all-in-one rails installation for windows. What you are missing is that PHP is _not_ a good language to do many things besides web applications in for the very reasons that all this scaffolding is provided for you. It is a very specialized language and IMO doesn't have the broad appeal that Ruby does. One other comment I would make is that, in my opinion, Ruby is a very powerful language, but its benefits aren't always immediately obvious to a beginner. I wouldn't consider myself an expert, but I have been programming for over 10 years now, and I would say that many of Ruby's advantages wouldn't be noticed by someone who didn't have a strong background in object-oriented programming, which takes a while to grasp (and about which, like I said, I still don't consider myself an expert) . Not that Ruby has a steep learning curve, but that it takes a while to fully appreciate. Carl