From: Chad Perrin Date: 2007-10-02T15:55:59+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby vs. PHP On Tue, Oct 02, 2007 at 12:59:36AM +0900, Marcin Raczkowski wrote: > Richard Conroy wrote: > >On 10/1/07, Marcin Raczkowski 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? > > why not? > rails is easy to prototype but is painfully slow and hard to optimize, i > know caching is going to play huge role but optimized complex sql > queries are also important My first thought was that it's a good idea because PHP is more painful to use than Ruby and sometimes I have needs other than those for which Rails is best suited. > > > >>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. PHP doesn't beat Rails at all, because "PHP" is not the same category of tool as Rail. PHP may be Ruby in some respects, and Smarty may beat Rails in some respects, but saying PHP beats Rails is like saying wood as a boat-building material beats a given shipyard (which happens to make all its ships out of steel). > > > > >All of these stacks are glued together with languages that are at least an > >order > >of magnitude slower than Systems languages like Java. Java isn't what I'd call a "systems language". That'd be something like C instead. Java tends to be better than languages like PHP for long-running webserver processes because of the optimizing VM, but that doesn't make it a "systems language". > > > >>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. > > any examples? i know google is starting to use Ruby. News to me. Last I checked, Steve Yegge actually ported Rails to Rhino (JavaScript) because he wanted to use Rails but Google wouldn't adopt Ruby (they have a strict policy about what languages their developers are allowed to use at Google, as far as I'm aware). -- CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ] W. Somerset Maugham: "The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit."