From: Sean Chittenden <sean@...>
Date: 2002-04-07T03:44:58+09:00
Subject: Re: Switching from PHP to Ruby - Comments Please

> Well, I'm about ready to make the switch to a Ruby based website. My
> plans are to use FreeBSD, Apache 1.3, MySQL and Ruby in either a
> mod_ruby/eruby or FastCGI/FCGI environment.

Congrats, you won't look back.

> Can someone comment on whether:
>  1) A Ruby based website is easier to implement than say PHP.

That depends on your comfort levels with Ruby.  After having switched
cold turkey from Perl to Ruby, I think it's far easier to develop
using mod_ruby/eRuby than it is with mod_perl/PHP.  Let me put it this
way though, in Ruby, the language gets in your way (much?) less than
it does in PHP so I would argue that no matter what, Ruby will tend to
be faster to develop in.

>  2) A Ruby based website does not have significant performance challenges.

1) If you've got a performance problem, you've got a good problem:
    that means you've got traffic.  Too many times I see people
    complain about performance and they really don't need it.  If you
    need performance, however, you can easily get that with the C
    extensions (which are markedly easier to learn than any other
    extension for other languages).  Anyway, for what it's worth,
    mod_ruby has performed about 90% as fast as mod_perl, 95% as fast
    as PHP and that's good enough for most of what I do: the rest of
    the time I use native C modules.

>  3) Session management can be done as implicitly with or without 
>     cookies as PHP4.

    Check out CGI.rb, it should have what you're looking for.  -sc


-- 
Sean Chittenden