Re: [tlug] PHP in Japan.

[Romans Malinovskis <romaninsh@example.com>]

> Not sure if this will be of any use or not. But I attended a talk on  
> Ruby
> on Rails a couple months ago. I was a little unclear about how it  
> worked
> or didn't work with php, but it seems to be similar in technology  
> while
> offering a lot more. It was also supposed to be very friendly to php
> programmers.
>
> The thing is it's a two part system. Ruby is a Japanese language  
> similar
> to PHP and Rails is an American devleopment for streamlining web  
> design
> projects. Together they are supposed to work very well as an overall
> development package. The orginal implementation of Rails was to work  
> with
> PHP, but PHP didn't go far enough and Ruby was found to be a very good
> match.
>
> The thing is I think you are probably more likely to find Ruby and  
> Ruby on
> Rails jobs in Japan. The coding differences are supposed to be  
> arround the
> level of differences between perl and PHP although it looks like a lot
> more OO based to me.

Ruby on Rails certainly did a lot of hiss. While PHP grew up from  
mixture of Perl and C it wasn't
really pretending to be a Object Oriented language. This was changed  
in PHP5 where they took
a giant leap towards several concepts taken from Java such as  
exceptions, class manipulations,
destructors making it possible to create a decent library. I've been  
there, I've created one [1].
However there are no testing framework, flexible libraries or even  
default template parsing system.
PHP also does not support anything which would live longer than one  
request out of the box.
PHP is bare bones. Ruby on Rails positioned itself as toolset which  
can be used out of
the box, which have templates. I've seen that it's easy to develop a  
blog on ROR, but is it
really what the people had in mind when they developed the concept?

Anyway - you shouldn't compare ROR with PHP. Compare it with Drupal[2]  
or with my library.
Once done correctly the situation seems more favorable for PHP.

As for the language of choice, each language have it's own niche. If  
you are building a blog,
use ROR, if you want to build a banner exchange engine, combine fast- 
cgi with C (or C++) with
PHP and MySQL, if you are writing online accounting software - use PHP  
with my library, if you
are writing online banking software - use Java. Each approach is  
different and depends on your
specific and requirements one might be better than other.

Therefore you can't call Ruby on Rails and PHP similar. It's like  
debates whether VIM or Emacs is better.
Each have it's own purpose - one is text editor and other is a LISP  
interpretator.

[1] http://adevel.com/amodules3
[2] http://drupal.org/ (see the modules section)



regards