Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, May 29, 2007:
PHP vs Rails (again)
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot.
Really interesting post and comment thread on Terry Chay’s blog.
Nice to see him defending PHP, though for small ISV’s I think it’s still most important to use what you know best. From my perspective the biggest issue with Rails continues to be it’s small install base which makes it impossible to build commercial downloadable applications around it.
On a side note, I am still alive!! Just trying to get v2 wrapped up before I go away for 2 weeks in June. My goal is to have v2 complete and when I return do a bit more testing and then start the beta process. Towards the end of this week (hopefully) I’ll be posting a v2 preview page and the beta sign up form so keep your eyes open for that.
Discussion
Hmmm, I didn't really see much defending of PHP, it seemed to mainly be ad hominem attacks on David Heinemeier Hansson, some profanity and lots of odd pictures seemingly dropped into the post at random. I thought the whole thing was just badly written.
Created by John Topley on 05.29.2007 1:02 pm
I'm a PHP programmer, but have started learning Ruby on Rails. It's obvious. New languages are more "high-level" and soon we will just write in English
Created by Silver Petrucelli on 05.30.2007 6:06 am
I agree that rails is not well suited to commercial *downloadable* applications, but I'm not sure that the install base is the main challenge here. Getting ruby up and running on a machine is pretty simple now. The big problem as I see it is that source obfuscation and protecting your IP are nearly impossible with a rails application at the moment. There are people looking at this, however; you're going to be waaay out on the bleeding edge if trying to do so.
Some people have put together small downloadable mini-apps with rails such as the Liquid template designer with Shopify. This seems pretty clean, but the thought of your entire application source being released feels less than ideal.
Finally, deploying rails is simply much harder than it needs to be at the moment. The experience between downloading and installing WordPress (PHP) and Typo (Rails) on an Apache instance was night and day. With the PHP it was pretty much just drop it and run... Typo was a nightmare in getting lighttpd setup, etc.
For a hosted SAAS product though, I'd still consider rails seriously.
Created by Kris on 05.31.2007 10:35 am