Going from PHP development to Ruby on Rails

mrbubbles

Hey folks,

I was hoping to speak to anyone - but especially freelance web developers - who have made the transition from primarily working with PHP to RoR. I know that there are loads of blog posts outlining the differences in the languages, but I'm talking more about your personal experiences (i.e. whether you use additional frameworks/CMS, whether you use it for EVERY site or just more bespoke ones, whether you mention the technology to clients at the offset, etc.).

Feel free to drop me a PM if you'd rather keep it out of the public domain.

Thanks in advance,

Joe

awking

Hones opinion - I didn't make a transition from PHP to ROR mainly because I never needed and I was never a big fan of Ruby to begin with. I am not a freelancer and I haven't done that in quite a few years. ROR has a few very strong points over PHP in general. Let's say for example switching from mysql(well MariaDB now for obvious reasons) to Postgre. That can be done in a matter of hours. Then again ROR is a framework and the same can be easily achieved if you are using Zend framework(and you know your way around it). I am not a big fan of zend framework either - I've had to use it in the past 8 months or so and it does make your life much easier but it is still crammed with stuff that I am pretty confident nobody will ever need.

As a leap - not much of a leap to be honest. But if you are on the quest for trying something new - i'd suggest python. Forget that it has been my primary language for many years now and I adore it, there are a few things that you just have to love about it:
1.Your code is always clean.
2.Fast as hell.
3.Easy to pick up, tons of resources.
4.Ability to use it both for web and desktop applications.
5.Unbelievably easy to debug.
6.A bit of a personal preference here, but it simply goes hand in hand with linux for which i give it many bonus points.

mrbubbles

Thanks awking, sounds like some reasonable advice there. I must admit, I've never really investigated Python and had always assumed that it was more of a scripting language but it's interesting to hear that it's good for web work too.

I'm not really a fan of Zend as I find it a bit bloated and overly complex. I've been using Codeigniter for a while and it's by my favourite framework at the moment. That said, I'm particularly attracted to the rapid prototyping aspects of RoR (and the ability to extend so easily through gems) so I may investigate both if I get a quiet patch...

Thanks for the tips

awking

Well python seems to capture the best of both worlds. It is considered a scripting language by default, although it works equally well for desktop applications(or even mobile now). I.e. I'm making my own IM service in my spare time in python(and GTK). There are tons of libraries out there that can handle web applications - cherrypy, django are the most common once. But python in some ways resembles java in the sense that the libraries and frameworks for python are literally uncountable. Just some information for python web:
https://wiki.python.org/moin/WebFrameworks

I personally use cherrypy at work and even though it is claimed to be a "minimalist python web framework" and we use it for api development, the results are unbelievable. We've deamonized each api and the bottom line is that at any given time I'm looking at around 30000 requests a second. Then again - even though failures are rare, if something goes down for a few minutes(a database or something else), the error logs become 50+ GB