My latest magazine article for php|architect magazine entitled “Learning from Ruby on Rails” was published today. You can think of it as a companion to my talk I gave at php|works back in September. One thing I will have to do is see how much of the article was edited. I worried that I rambled and that it would deviate too much from my talk.
Anyhow, I encourage you to read it and send me your feedback.



Hi Chris, I just read your article and really enjoyed it. Like yourself my code improved so much after building a couple of apps using ror and learning ruby. I just feel rejuvenated it’s kinda like taking a holiday.. now I’m back coding in php and using cakephp for my clients. I would acutally rather be coding in ruby but most of my clients are tied to php for the time being. Anyway great work and I look forward to reading more of your articles.
Hi Leighmac,
Thanks for the kind words. Being exposed to Rails really opened my eyes to how I was actually building my applications, and the concepts (like you have found) are easily transferable to PHP.
Hi Chris – I just read your article this morning while at the local book shop enjoying some hot chocolate. It was a very interesting article and one I hope a lot of developers will take to heart.
I’ve only given cursory glances at Rails – read through intros, watched screen casts, etc – but it’s simplicity is very nice and, in my opinion, as yet unmatched in PHP.
I have some ideas on a framework that I’ve been playing with in my spare time. I would love to discuss it with you and get your feedback. If you’re interested, please feel free to drop my a line at the provided email address.
[...] was it for me on Day 1! I thought about going to Chris Hartjes' talk, What PHP can learn from Ruby On Rails, but I just recently read the companion article in php|architect, so didn't feel I would learn [...]