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Are there advantages to Ruby on Rails over a good PHP Framework?

I have a need to find a lower cost development and deployment solution and I have been reading about PHP and Ruby. I am such a newbie to either of these frameworks I don't have a good perspective on which might have an advantage over the other. I mostly have basic needs for my web applications:

Good Authentication Capabilities
Session Control
Data Layer Access (CRUD)
Well documented and tested Script Libraries

My first application will need to handle online PDF forms. I will design the form so that on submit it will the send the data to the server in XML format for further processing. It would be great if one of these frameworks already had a library to handle this.

Thanks,

Frank

Beverley Portlock

A few years ago I looked at Ruby and decided it wasn't worth the effort to learn it. There is a lot of mystique around Ruby but at the end of the day it is just another programming language - just like PHP. The big deciders for me were

a) PHP is sufficiently similar to C / C++ / Java / Pascal that my past experiences with those languages meant I got off to a very fast start in PHP

b) At the time, almost no servers using Ruby were available. It was very niche and it was easier getting servers that used PHP rather than Ruby although I expect that will change over time.

PHP's libraries have nearly tool you'll ever need and the OOP capabilities of PHP are perfectly sufficient.

Looking at your requirements

Good Authentication Capabilities - depends what you are authenicating. If you mean "user login" then it is trivially simple in PHP

Session Control - PHP has very good session control

Data Layer Access (CRUD) - PHP supplies database abstraction layers via mechanisms like PDO or MySQLi. Whilst these are not CRUD they allow the data access to be placed in classes so that you gain abstraction from the messy details of what happens at DB level. Implementing MVC is quite straightforward.

Well documented and tested Script Libraries - To be honest, PHP has too many script libraries out there and many of the functions are in the PHP core anyway.

More important than any Framework (IMO!!) is a good editor and programming environment to support that editor and Eclipse with the PDT plugin works well. If you combine this with a CVS or SVN server then you will find PHP very productive.

Fgriffin

ASKER

Thanks, Bportlock.

Is this the PDT plugin you are talking about? http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/

I see they have resources and tutorials on that site but do you have other tutorials and resources that you found helpful?

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Beverley Portlock

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Fgriffin

ASKER

Thank you so much! This is great information.

Beverley Portlock

Don't forget to come back and ask if you have any difficulties or questions.

Another advantage of PHP over Ruby is the level of support. Just using Experts Exchange as an example, there are 11 questions in progress whereas in PHP there are 589. In my view that means that you will find it easier getting support for PHP.

When you use PHP, do as much as possible using the library functions and classes. It will save you a lot of time.

Fgriffin

ASKER

Yes, support is a very big component, you make a very good point. I understand about functions and classes - I started learning FLEX some time ago but got pulled off on to anther project.

You have been very helpful and I appreciate your time!