I am a big believer that today, PHP is the way to go for several reasons. I am not saying that Ruby and ROR don’t have good things about them, it is just that PHP overall, is the better option.

You can learn more at my dedicated PHP web site: http://www.killerphp.com.

… You will find hours of free video tutorials and articles, as well a few opinion pieces that go into the details as to why I prefer PHP over any other web application development language today:

- Will Ruby Kill PHP
- PHP for Web Designers

… And there are a few more.

BTW, I also have a beginners site on css: http://www.csstutorial.net/

Hope that helps,

Stefan

I am currently a mechanical engineer here in my country. However my recent fascination with the developments in the web has made me decide to shift careers and try web development. I think it is very dynamic and it is exactly the kind of industry that I want. I am currently studying CSS. Dreamweaver, and XHTML and will soon study a server side programming language after trying out a couple of project websites. However I am now confused on which language to study. Ruby or PHP? Sure, PHP is currently the well documented and most popular but somehow the recent news about RoR has made me rethink on whether I should learn Ruby as my first language or go along with PHP. I hope you can give advice. (my main consideration is to learn how to build a scalable, low maintenance database driven websites as soon as possible)

Thanks a lot.

Russel

PHP web development has no such dominant framework of choice.

So to answer the question above: “can a PHP framework be as effective as Rails?”… probably not. The PHP web developer community is not as unified around its most popular framework as the Ruby web developer community is unified around Rails.

(does anyone know which PHP framework is the most popular?)

I searched for non-rails frameworks for Ruby development and there is hardly anything – “Nitro” and “Web Application Framework” were the only 2 I could find, and I didn’t get the sense that there was much buy-in. The unification behind Rails puts a lot of pressure on Rails to solve all problems and produces a momentum of evolution that cannot be matched by any PHP frameworks.

Well, these are my wild theories on the topic. I guess I’m saying that the proportion of the community (Ruby devs) that is devoted to and agrees to a set of conventions (Rails) necessitates the evolution of that convention set. If tomorrow there were suddenly 20 new ruby frameworks that effectively competed with Rails, I think then “Ruby” would become far less threatening to PHP. As it stands, there is still a lot of php development with no framework at all, something I am sure cannot be said for Ruby.

We actually used Zend (even in it’s early stages) for a couple of social networking sites. It wasn’t complete at the time (the Zend framework) but it nonetheless proved to be valuable.

PHP has a messy legacy but it is solid, proven and widely used.

I put a stop on the project because I did not want to jump into trying to tweak for speed.

Sure, everybody loves easy to use language/frameworks just like when Java was born, a lot of C++ people switched boat.

After several years of Java existence, it shifted from easy/productive to bloated. Most people these days went back to C/C++ coding for backend server. One example is http://www.meebo.com.

Rails itself is a framework made by 37signals people when they did their web application. Similar to Django when Lawrence-Journal developers invented it.

These frameworks were made by them to handle their own software, which in the process of doing so, they (might) found it to be a good marketing stuff. This reminds me of Extreme Programming methodology that Kent Beck et al. tried to market when they did their Chrysler software project.

So what happened to Extreme Programming? A thing of a past, and a bag of blast from the community saying that they’re just creating a religion and trying to market the methodology where in reality, it just doesn’t work.

By the way, couple weeks ago I read DHH blog saying he had to code some part of their web app using C to optimize the bottleneck. This means that if you need to tweak Rails, you better know the internal code.

I can’t see medium-large size companies simply dropping the PHP mantle and running to Ruby. It would create a lot of unnecessary work for starters.

Who knows though?