Ruby-on-Rails (Ror) vs PHP

I’m not a platform zealot – but I really wonder about the hoopla with Ruby-on-Rails. I read the “Agile Web Development” book and respect the folks behind Ruby/Rails but I think they came out to be VERY lucky to surf the Web 2.0 wave and essentially become “synonymous” with this period. Granted they preach a MVC-oriented approach to web application development and that while the RoR following grew, PHP didn’t encourage MVC practices through any particular framework – it’s not the case anymore with new frameworks like phpmvc, symfony, CakePHP, Zend, and CodeIgniter available today (all with their loyal followings).

The folks at Twitter recently expressed their difficulties in scaling with RoR – check this and this. They faced moderate backlash from the RoR development community and I consider that to be fairly childish and immature. In general,most members of the community regard the language/platform as the best thing since sliced bread!

The fact is: RoR is relatively new and not enough applications that have grown to the level as Twitter have been built on it to regard it as “enterprise-friendly” – yet. PHP on the other hand – however sloppy it has been in the past – has slowly built itself into a super fast, rich, scalable, integration-friendly language that has a large developer following but not as “connected” to the Web 2.0 phenomenon we’re facing today.

Call me a PHP zealot to balance the playing field out but I think both Ruby-on-Rails and PHP have their boons and brays. However, the long of the short is: RoR is young, sexy, standardized and lucky to be married to Web 2.0 while PHP extendable, flexible, and with a bit more freedom.  With Ruby – Rails is the framework you use.  With PHP, you’ve got a handful to choose from all backed by their own development communities.

We’re seeing the same thing happen with Javascript frameworks (Prototype, Dojo, jQuery, YUI, etc) and with platforms too (OpenLazlo, Apollo, Etelos, and the soon-to-be-launched BungeeLabs).