Below is a comment I posted on a friend’s dev blog. Looks like he’s turning RoR because RoR just seems pretty sweet to him (originally a Perl programmer, so he welcomes the improvements Ruby’s brought to the field). Just a bit of background: Doug is my right-hand man on Flood’s new website. He’s pretty new to PHP, but has done a really good job picking it up. I should also mention he’s a FANTASTIC DB guy. If you want to query it, he can probably figure it out.
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PHP has several pretty good frameworks, but that shouldn’t be a problem for people in the PHP community. We’re used to having options, and lots of them. After listening to a few talks about the new Zend Framework, I think it’s going to be a pretty big deal fairly soon. What’s most exciting, for me at least, is the fact that the community isn’t being snobbish about the ways things should be done – they aren’t sticking to any one game plan (like copying one language or another). Rather, they’re pulling the best features from many languages and combining them into the framework. So RoR may be great, but it also has shortcomings to it, which the ZF community is making sure they don’t repeat.
RoR has some great things about it, or so I hear. I don’t doubt it one bit, but there is soon to be stiff competition from the PHP end. I also like to console my self, knowing that the RoR camp tends to have a few very vocal cheerleaders, so maybe it’s not as big as it may seem. But for now, Ruby just happens to have the “best” (most developed?) framework on the web. I say good for Ruby. In the end what matters most is that FOSS becomes better by building on the strengths of other projects.
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