PHP5 Vs. CakePHP Vs. RubyOnRails?

OldJavaHack writes "If you could start a website (with MySQL for persistence) from scratch and you had a choice of PHP5, CakePHP, or RubyOnRails — which would you choose and why? Things to consider in your decision: 1. Maturity of solution; 2. Features; 3. Size of community of skilled users (to build a team); 4. Complexity/ease of use (for neophytes to master); 5. Greatest strength of your choice, and the greatest weaknesses of the other two. Here is a comparison of capabilities."

Comments

Rails

[Baddas]

I've worked in all three, repeatedly, and there's really no contest. Rails is so much easier to get concepts out, and has so many fewer bugs (in my experience), that it's silly to use PHP at this point, unless you have overriding reasons for choosing it aside from inherent qualities.

Doesn't it depend on what you intend to do?

[javakah]

There are different things that you can do with a website, so first of all it really depends on what you are intending. PHP5 will be great for building creating more traditional websites that are driven by HTML forms, and is probably the best thing to use for such purposes. Ruby on Rails seems to be meant for if you are planning to build AJAX apps. It's fairly easy, with a lower learning curve, but does have scalability issues. Another option that you might consider if you are looking for AJAX stuff would be GWT, the Google Web Toolkit. Larger learning curve, but very fast web apps. Really though, comparing PHP5 and RoR seems kind of like comparing apples and oranges. Just remember, figure out what you are trying to do first, then pick the language.

Re:Doesn't it depend on what you intend to do?

[AaronBrethorst]

I disagree. Rails is fantastic for quickly rolling database-driven forms apps. It includes some nice helpers for quickly integrating asynchronous behavior (Ajax), but it's certainly not mandatory. PHP5 doesn't include an OR mapper, and nor should it; an OR mapper should be part of a separate framework or library (just as it is with Ruby and Ruby on Rails). I think that Rails actually has a fairly steep learning curve. It has *very* specific ways of handling most things, and trying to fight against these things will only come back to hurt you in the end. Additionally, since it requires you to function in an MVC mode, there might be an additional bit of learning present as you figure out how to properly separate your app into presentation, model and controller layers.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to need and experience. If you know how to use PHP, why not use it? If you have to integrate a new feature into an existing Rails app, then you'd better learn Rails in a hurry. Personally, I'll build Windows server-targeted web apps in ASP.NET because I know the tooling and the backend. If I'm hosting on Linux or UNIX, I'll write it in Rails because the language and frameworks are so much nicer to use than PHP.

Re:Sure

[dedazo]

I should probably clarify my original post.

I've never used Ruby or RoR, but my impression of it seems to be one of great expectations and not a lot of delivery. I've read way too many blogs by people who built web sites with RoR only to have them crash and burn under load. Also, the language itself seems to place a lot of importance on clever syntactic sugar, which being an old fart I automatically dislike.

Now, "scale" does not mean the same thing to everyone. There's Digg and Wikipedia, and then there's the vertical business app that gets 200 hits per day. RoR might be a good choice for the latter, not so good for the former.

Also, although my experience with PHP is limited as well, it seems to me that it's a mature enough platform with a good runtime (that tends to be confusing at times) and a *massive* user base. The amount of readily available PHP code out there is amazing. It will take Ruby quite a few years to get to that point, I think. So maybe Ruby is not a good beginner's environment, application-wise. But that's just my perception of it. PHP is more to the point. On the other hand, RoR might be more mature and stable than CakePHP, just because it's been around longer.

The best tool for the job and all that, you know?

Oh... and BTW, first post =)

Re:Sure

[suv4x4]

I've never used Ruby or RoR, but my impression of it seems to be one of great expectations and not a lot of delivery. I've read way too many blogs by people who built web sites with RoR only to have them crash and burn under load.

You have the right idea about RoR (speaking as someone who excitedly spent /wasted/ a month learning into it). RoR has some hot ideas but it tries to be too smart and locked down for its own good.

CakePHP is a typical PHP open source project: random code, bloated, no direction. It's also cool, in a way, but I'd never run big project on it.

One promising framework for PHP appeared to be Mojavi, but it later stalled and was forked into Agavi. Agavi tends to try to be way too flexible for its own good (unlike RoR), and in the end is just not simple to use. There's just too much stuff in there you'll never use in a real world project, which complicates code understanding and development.

I also find the "CakePHP vs PHP5" question to not make any sense, I'm sorry.

Re:In other words...

[Foofoobar]

I ran PHPulse, the world's fastest MVC framework for PHP with a 10 terabyte database backend gets millions of hits daily and having to send data to our team in Manila and Tijuana. PHPulse gave us near split second page loads. As for not scaling, tell that to all the companies like Disney, IBM, AT&T, MTV and others who use it on their frontend. It's the most widely deployed web language out there and there is example after example after example of it scaling.

Hell, even the Ruby, and Ruby on Rails site http://shiflett.org/blog/2006/feb/php-easter-eggs> need PHP in order to scale

Re:Sure

[knewter]

Well, you can get specific like that, yes. But please, follow the story to its completion. The issue was solved, and easily solvable from day one. (For a better solution to the same problem, see this link.)

I currently write chronically non-scaling Rails apps myself. I can write apps in Rails that scale well, but it turns out there's a huge market for sites that don't need to, and that's where I'm spending some time these days. I've also worked on a nicely-scaling social network site in Rails. There are plenty of tutorials on how to make sure your Rails app scales, but here are the things I'll have to do to my company's custom CMS to make it scale:

1. Make admins visit the site via admin.site.com
2. Turn off page caching for admin. requests
3. Turn on page caching for everyone else, and expire the caches every five minutes

Oh noes! The horror! Then it's up to Apache to handle pretty much every request. Of course, my use case only has to make static content scale. As long as you're actually writing nice stateless apps on the web, in whatever language, they'll scale. If a given URL has static content across visits, they'll scale insanely well, because you don't Mb>use RoR to serve the site in those cases, you use Apache.