Comments on: Rails Fan Boys Missed The Point

By: Les

Les — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 06:46:59 +0000

> I think and the “fan boy” type is much more prevalent
> in the Rails community than in the PHP community.

True, however there was that same mentality a few years back with PHP Java although things have settled down now from the PHP camp.

I think it’s more to do with that fact that PHP has become more accepted as a safe platform to develop with, it as a platform is taken more seriously now.

You could say PHP has matured and come of age I suppose?

But Rails [and Ruby for that matter] isn’t PHP as the two platfoms are very distinct in their nature, so how long it’ll take Rails to mature is anyone’s guess.

By: Chris Hartjes

Chris Hartjes — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 02:33:39 +0000

@Phillip
I think you’re missing my point: Rails *is* a good framework, but the ideas behind it are more important than the framework itself. As for the “tone” of my blog, well, I tend to write what I think and the “fan boy” type is much more prevalent in the Rails community than in the PHP community. I’ve no interest in a religious war that has no winners, only casualties.

By: Philip

Philip — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 21:42:08 +0000

It seems to me that you’ve missed a great opportunity to raise the level of the discourse by refusing to descend to the level of the Rails proponents you criticize. Why not just tacitly acknowledge that not all Rails users are as dogmatic as this particular subset, suggest that we all tune out the shrill religious adherents, and move forward in the understand that frameworks are extremely valuable whether implemented in Ruby or in PHP (even if we each have our favorite languages)?

It seems to me that your general tone, backed up by the intentionally pejorative term /Rails fan boys/, has more in common with the people you’re criticizing than you’d probably be willing to admit. If your goal is to escalate an already full-blown religious war, replete with all the inflexibility that comes along with that, then more power to you. You’ll probably be successful. But if your goal is to appeal to the pragmatic 95% of us then I think you’re missing the mark.

I mean, I love Rails. I’d use it every chance I could. But when, like Derek Sivers, I want a platform that’s somewhat compatible with my legacy code then I’m very grateful for PHP frameworks. Seems like a win-win, but maybe I’m hopelessly naive and need to be picking a side to cheer for. *shrug*

By: Mariano Iglesias

Mariano Iglesias — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 00:38:08 +0000

@Chris: I think operator overloading is a cool feature to have, though nothing that can’t be achieved by using interfaces in pure PHP5, or even better, who knows if it won’t be added in PHP7 or something…

But to tell you the truth, if we would have operator overloading availability I would use it heavily.

Just think:

$a = array(1, 10, 20);
$b = array(2, 15);
$c = $a + $b;

Or in CakePHP instead of doing:

$data = array(‘Model’ => array(‘field’ => ‘value’));
$saved = $this->Model->create($data) && $this->Model->save();

to create a new record, you could just do:

$data = array(‘Model’ => array(‘field’ => ‘value’));
$saved = $this->Model + $record;

I know, seems like a nice to have

By: Les

Les — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 14:39:51 +0000

> let me know when you run into an application-level
> problem Rails can’t solve because I’m willing to bet it’s
> been solved with PHP.

I couldn’t have put it better myself. Well done for an excellent post (just subscribed to your rss the other week there).

I live and die by PHP but I ain’t going to start a flame war (I’ll leave that to my own blog) but everyone needs to realise that Ruby on Rails isn’t the holy grail.

Maybe this experience will start to waken a few people up now…

By: JadB

JadB — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 01:37:38 +0000

My own tribulations with RoR wouldn’t be enough to give a clear cut judgement – shortly after I started, I discovered CakePHP and never looked back.

What I like most about RoR is it’s online-media-boom that, IMO, raised the bar higher for many PHP developers and triggered the beginning of a new generation of frameworks. So thanks to that RoR!

And Chris, I can’t but agree with you when you say:

When you need to build an “application” that is doing more than just CRUD then that’s where PHP shines

All those big RoR sites out there are nothing but CRUD, starting with 37Signals own apps.

By: Chris Hartjes

Chris Hartjes — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 00:52:32 +0000

@Tony
It does appear that certain types of sites appear to be a good fit for Rails – mostly the CRUD type. That’s no slight against Rails, that’s just what it’s really good at. When you need to build an “application” that is doing more than just CRUD then that’s where PHP shines. Rails does give you some good benefits, but I think it’s become obvious that it’s very hard to move a legacy application with a database structure that is not initially Rails-friendly to Rails from another language.

@Brendon
Well, I don’t know that I would call an inability to do operator overloading an “application level problem”. More like a “nice to have feature”

By: Brendon Kozlowski

Brendon Kozlowski — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 00:45:46 +0000

…just to add to that, I fully agree with what you said. I don’t want anyone to think my reply was meant as an immature poke, it was simply a humorous gesture only. Thanks for the story about CD Baby!

By: Brendon Kozlowski

Brendon Kozlowski — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 00:44:16 +0000

“I’ll be here working on my PHP stuff, let me know when you run into an application-level problem Rails can’t solve because I’m willing to bet it’s been solved with PHP. Numerous times.”

I’d like to do some operator overloading with my objects in PHP. Sorry, as a PHP user, I couldn’t resist – it’s one of the things I’d like most that would be rather impossible to implement in PHP’s engine properly, from what I’ve heard.

By: Tony

Tony — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 23:02:20 +0000

My experience with ruby is limited, and I only have a conceptual knowledge of rails. One thing I have noticed though is that a lot of rails sites share a similar look and feel. For better or worse, it seems to fit a project into a certain mold. Am I wrong in saying this? I guess that’s true with any framework, right? While I heard on some podcast that “rails is only good for building site that look like a blog”, this is definately an exaggeration… but maybe CdBaby didn’t fit well within the mold that Rails encourages? Your thoughts?