From: Richard Conroy <richard.conroy@...>
Date: 2007-10-01T20:51:23+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby vs. PHP

On 10/1/07, Marcin Raczkowski <mailing.mr@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello
>
> My company is trying to get big contract for creating and maintaining
> HUGE website (nation wide portal). We're trying to convince investor
> that Ruby (i don't mean rails) with custom tailored MVC framework is
> best solution, we're going to make prototypes in rails FAST, then port
> heaviest and most frequently used parts to my custom framework, rewrite
> AR into tuned SQL queries etc.

Why is this a good idea?

>
> investor was quite impresed with speed of development but of course
> there's trouble in paradise .. he hired a consultant :/ - this guy AFAIK
> did lot's of work but only in PHP and he is trying to convince investor
> PHP is way to go.

PHP beats Rails in certain aspects; for instance if development of the
site is seasonal in nature, as opposed to continuous, the customer
is likely to be hiring as they need. The large availability of PHP
developers plays in its favour.

> could you please help me find some benchmarks comparing speed of PHP vs
> Ruby (especially YARV/JRuby, if ound some benchamrks that show Ruby is
> slower in interpreter), mayby comparsions of security(in Rails it's
> preatty imposible to do sql injections if programmer is carefull enought
> to use properly constructed queries).

Well none of that is true, or really important. Sure its easier to secure Rails.
But if you are making a large nationwide portal (I am going to assume that
that means you have high activity) then the performance of your rendering
component (PHP or Rails) doesn't actually matter.

PHP isn't exactly assembler speed itself. Ruby is in the same league (slower
with 1.8, faster with YARV). There is a reason that PHP is a central component
in a LAMP stack - probably the solution of choice for websites with high user
load. In principle Ruby can do the same, in practice we have only had
about 2 years
as a community to get big Ruby sites up. You also have an equivalent ASP
stack based on windows components.

All of these stacks are glued together with languages that are at least an order
of magnitude slower than Systems languages like Java.

>
> also I'm open to any arguments(preferable documented, with showcases,
> and understandable by investor(who never had much expirience with
> computers except for e-mail and www)) that would help convince him that
> ruby is much better then php  :)

There's plenty of sites out there doing pretty heavy stuff with Rails,
but beyond
Rails there is not much evidence that shows pure Ruby custom web solutions
to scale. Rails has a lot of features and best practices built in to
help it scale.
In a pure Ruby solution you are committing to re-writing all of that
from scratch.

Based on your questions/responses here, I think the consultant is right; that
PHP is a better solution for the customer.