I have had two major problems with Ruby and Ruby on Rails:
- Hard to find Ruby/Rails hosting.
- Not too many clients looking for Ruby programmers.
One thing has changed:
A major hosting company (GoDaddy.com,) has stepped up and now supports Ruby on Rails hosting - there goes my first argument against learning Ruby!
Quote from GoDaddy:
“Our customers are finding Ruby on Rails to be incredibly valuable in shaping their online presence,” said Bob Parsons, GoDaddy.com CEO and Founder. “We are pleased to be able to offer support for a framework that increases the utility of the sites we host.”
With GoDaddy.com jumping in, this will force/influence other hosting companies to adopt Ruby and as such, I believe over the next year, Ruby hosting will become more and more common.
BUT EVERYTHING IS NOT PERFECT WITH RUBY… YET.
Even though it looks as though the hosting thing is resolving itself, we still have the issue of the number of Ruby gigs/jobs floating around … not that many yet.
There is still so much PHP out there (hosting, frameworks, products) that I think for next few years, PHP will continue to dominate with regards to small to medium size projects.
That said, I think that Ruby will be a player for a few reasons … most important, is the strong acceptance of Ruby (and Rails) by the Java community.
Another problem with Ruby and Rails, is the stability of the fastcgi plug-in that works with Apache 2.x.
Basically, there are still some lingering issues with how Ruby ‘talks’ to Apache. This is major, but there are many high profile, high traffic websites that seem to be running fine anyway … ?
CONCLUSION
Despite the aforementioned issues with Ruby and Rails, I am actually involved with putting together a major project with Rails … I know, I know, I’m a bit of a hypocrite!
My reasons?
- Ruby and Rails are compelling - there’s some good stuff in there that should make the project much easier to build.
- I wanted to explore Ruby and Rails with a real project - I’m just a ‘Curious George’ I suppose …
I plan to come back to you and give you my impressions as to how easy (and useful) it would be for web designers (not programmers) to learn at Ruby vs. say PHP.
Stefan
In my experience of getting into RoR and building a custom shopping cart, I have found it to be a programmers dream come true. I can still understand my code even after coming back to it months later. I redid my PHP retail site with RoR (see www.ifactoryoutlet.com).
After this experience I realized that with RoR you have to know a lot more about servers and deployment then I ever had to know with PHP. PHP just worked and it was rock solid…, provided your code was good.
With RoR you have to know about apache, or starting and stopping lighttpd, or killing zombied fastcgi processes, … you practically have to be a server administrator as well as a web developer, which is more than I really want to deal with. I’ve tried two different rails hosts (not textdrive yet, because they are expensive and the community seems like you need to be a do-it-yourself know-everything-about-linux guru to be using them, plus you can’t develop on their servers), and experience more down time than I ever did with php hosts. Maybe it’s the hosts or some jerk on the shared server, whatever it is I didn’t have this issue with PHP.
Still, after using RoR I can never go back to PHP (unless it’s a one page script), and recommend all my friends to use RoR. There are just too many good things in Rails that I put up with the bugs in fastcgi in the hopes that in time enough smart people, people smarter than me, will get in there and fix whatever makes rails less stable than PHP.
@Henry,
Have you used any php frameworks like CakePHP or the Zend Framework?
To compare ROR (a framework buit with Ruby,) to the PHP language would to me seem unfair - we need to compare ‘apples’ to ‘apples’ if you know what I mean.