From: Richard Conroy <richard.conroy@...>
Date: 2007-10-03T00:57:07+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby vs. PHP

On 10/2/07, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb@cesmail.net> wrote:
> This thread has gone on so long that I've forgotten the original
> *business* question that was posed. But I *do* remember that it *was* a
> business question, and not a linguistic one. Therefore, I think that the
> Google and Amazon experiences, both of large web enterprises that
> started small(ish) are highly relevant.

Well thats what has shaped my answers. In particular the OP wanted
to push his custom Ruby (non-Rails) solution over a custom PHP
solution on a customer.

The reasoning behind building another Ruby Web Framework from
scratch on the customers' dollars instead of using the already
excellent ones out there seemed a bit flawed to me. In which, case
a Warts-n-all PHP solution may have suited the customer better
(who according to the OP is not tech-savvy).

(Chad - this was the point I was getting at when I was saying
PHP beats Rails)

> 1. I've forgotten exactly what Matz has said about Ruby in the corporate
> world -- perhaps someone here (even Matz) can repeat that. But Rails
> clearly *does* have a corporate presence. The last time I checked, there
> were very few "pure open-source non-corporate" Rails projects around,
> vs. a number of highly-publicized corporate ones.

My Recollection: They (Matz & the Ruby Dev team) are not actively courting
the corporate world in the way .NET & Java did. They are out to make a
beautiful language, if the corporate world enjoys it too, well thats
good aswell;
but there will be no concessions.

DHH & Rails Dev isn't trying to court it either, but you make a leading edge
web technology with proven cost savings and the corporate world will follow.

> 2. The LAMP stack is a major force in web applications. I'm not quite
> ready to say, "Nobody ever got fired for deploying an RHEL LAMP web
> application", but I think you have to be pretty close to that.

The LAMP stack is an instance of 'The Pit of Success' - by following the
easy, well-known, route to implementation of one (even dogmatically),
your solution will probably Just Work with predictable amount of effort.

That previous statement generates a lot of warm fuzzies to corporate
stake holders.

> So I think a home-grown non-Rails Ruby solution is a non-starter here
> for a number of reasons. It's not "Ruby vs. PHP", it's "Rails vs. PHP".

And no disservice to the non-Rails Ruby frameworks out there. Certainly
pure-Mongrel handlers, Merb & thread-safe ORM sounds like a fun
implementation to me.

But be nice to your customers.