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

Re:Sure

[NickCatal]

And the award to the quickest troll in the world goes to......

Re:Sure

[king-manic]

      1. PHP: What people build real websites with.
      2. RoR: What people build websites with because they want to be kewl and later switch to PHP when they realize it simply does not scale, complete with acerbic "I wanted to believe" blog entry and everything

Next?


Pfft.. Real men code websites in Java and ASP. Scalability and performance are for pussies. My server to chugs at 10 hits/minute and it likes it.

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

[Max Littlemore]

And the award to the quickest troll in the world goes to......

kdawson, for posting this absolute shit as an IT story with nothing more than a link to a wikipedia article in the summary!

Congratulations!

Hey, kdawson, while you're reading this, can I just grease you up about a story I want to post about how Steam will replace electricity to power the electric kettles of the future? Thanks buddy!

Re:Sure

[jamesh]

Pfft.. Real men code websites in Java and ASP.

I think Real Men would be more likely to build the web server and TCP stack into their web sites, for performance reasons.

At least that's what we did in my day.

*cough*

the answer: it depends

[david_bonn]

Honestly, great websites and web applications have been written using all three of those products. What the best choice for your website will be depends a lot on what your website is. Each of those frameworks makes certain assumptions about how the world works, and you will be happiest with a framework that is closest to your pwn assumptions -- otherwise you'll spend as much time fighting the framework as writing your website.

Any halfway skilled programmer will be able to do useful work with any of those frameworks fairly early on, but all of them are also very rich environments, so there's always more to learn.

I've written web apps in an ungodly tangle of PHP4 and PHP 5 and Perl and using Ruby on Rails. Currently Ruby on Rails is in favor, but is far from perfect.

Probably most of my frustration with Rails and PHP 5 has to do with Active Record. My big gripes are: (1) Schemas, entity-relationship diagrams, and queries tell me how an application works -- with Active Record this information is strewn across a whole bunch of files (especially in Rails); (2) Database-independence is a nice idea, but in reality, how often over the lifetime of your website will you migrate to a different database? Usually your database is chosen for you. Usually a switching databases involves coordinating with a lot of people who you'd usually rather not have to deal with -- those issues will take far more time and energy than differences between MySQL and Oracle; (3) a pretty common design pattern for web pages is to have a form that let's you fill in a few parameters (date, maybe geographical information) into a huge multi-table select statement -- you can do that in Active Record, but basically all you gain is a marginally fancier wrapper than you would have with DBI.

Re:Brrrr...

[Baddas]

JSP and ASP are terrible compared to rails. You really ought to pick up Agile Web Development with Ruby On Rails and go through the sample project at least.

It'll change the way you think about development for the web.

Or, if you're really set on Java, try Rails for Java Developers and you'll see how much more concise the exact same code is in Rails.

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 =)

Easy

[OriginalArlen]

PHP5 Vs. CakePHP Vs. RubyOnRails? Easy - mod_perl.

Re:Errr, this is a new story

[corychristison]

I agree.

Lately people (aka: script kiddies) seem to be losing the distinction between what is a language, and what is a framework. I cannot remember the last time I downloaded a PHP script and it required PEAR. I absolutely despise PEAR, and all other frameworks that really don't seem to have a place.

Over the past 5 years or so (I develop websites for a living) I've developed a framework-style setup that I use for all new projects. Most sites don't share the same code as I develop project-specific. But the structure is the same, and in most cases I could grab a pile of files from one site and plop them in the next and it would work.

Use the tool as it is meant to be used. PHP is a language. A framework is a framework. Please don't compare them on the same level.

Django

[Max Romantschuk]

Given complete freedom, my choice is Django: http://www.djangoproject.com/

Check out the tutorial, and you'll know why: http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/tutoria l01/

Wrong Criteria, Wrong Problem, Wrong Solution

[jaaron]

What about the requirements of the, you know, actual website application?

You've provided no information on the actual website that you intend to develop. That's the important part -- the features and functionality to the customers and end users.

Instead of considering the features of the language and framework first, how about the features of the application? How many users? Who will be supporting it? What kind of server resources are available? Do you need internationalization? What's the roadmap for the site over the next 3 to 5 years? Maybee then you can map the features of the website to the features of the framework or language, such as the maturity of the libraries directly related to your webapp.

But picking the implementation language independent of the functionality of the website is a classic sign of solving the wrong problem. I don't care what you program it in, if you're asking these questions first, you are programming it in the wrong language.

Tapestry

[Anonymous Coward]

Or another Java framework, due to the maturity, scalability, availability of libraries, and number of people who know it.

Rails just does not have a stable server. Webrick + fastCGI, or Mongrel, they both crash regularly for us. Also I've had to maintain several Rails apps written by others, and it sucks. All those neat tricks that makes it "productive" for the first programmer makes it difficult to understand and maintain for everyone else.

Python and Django

[egrinake]

How about using Python and Django? Python is a much cleaner language than both PHP and Ruby, and Django makes it a joy to build web-sites.

I've been lead developer of a large enterprise system written in PHP for the last few years, and grown increasingly frustrated with just how ugly PHP is. Object-orientation has been tacked on as an after-thought (almost all of the API is procedural, without using exceptions for error-handling), the API is messy and inconsistent, it's somewhat inefficient (has to parse all the code for each request, unless you use an opcode cache), and the syntax is just plain ugly when compared to Python.

Never tried Ruby on Rails, but you should at least give Django a spin before deciding.

In other words...

[jaaron]

I've never used Ruby or RoR... my experience with PHP is limited as well...

In other words, you were trolling. :-)

Having done websites in PHP, Rails, Python and Java, I can say that they all suck one way or another. Ruby and Rails are both very different from PHP and my personal unconfirmed suspicion is that a lot of the Rails problems people have are from programmers who jump over into Rails without first learning what they're getting themselves into. Deploying Rails can be very difficult and you can face a lot of issues that you would never face for PHP.

Personally, I prefer Python or Ruby over PHP any day.

Re:In other words...

[dedazo]

In other words, you were trolling.

Nope. I know enough about high-scaling distributed applications to be dangerous, since that's what I do for a living. I know PHP runs sites like Wikipedia and Digg, among others. I know I've never seen a blogger go on record to complain about PHP not scaling as he expected, while for RoR that sort of thing seemed quite common in the last year and a half or so.

Yes, your execution can suck and so it won't really matter what language or stack you use. But the impression I have of RoR is that it falls apart a lot faster than PHP under comparable loads. Maybe the crappy internal design PHP suffers from might be an advantage in this case, because Ruby is designed better but it seems to suffer from classic bottom-heavy OO problems you see in other languages.

Ultimately the person who submitted this might be building an accounts receivable app at a little company that gets three hundred hits per day, so it won't really matter if he writes it with Ruby, PHP or Malbolge.

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

Have your cake/php/rails and eat it to

[jalmond]

What we have here is another usual question that all really depends on your project type. That being said, I'll try to break from the typical, slashdot format and attempt to address your question:

1. Maturity of Solution: 1st PHP5, then Ruby, then Cake. Shouldn't be a lot of controversy here. PHP has been around since the dinosaur age, ruby came around with all that slick don't repeate yourself talk and then cake came about and tried to add ruby like framework to PHP.
2. Features is really going to depend on what your looking for. Rails allows you to write a lot of fairly complex stuff quickly, cake arguably has better built in security, PHP5 will scale better then any of them.
3. Everybody and their mama knows php5, any new kid thats worth a darn is probably learning rails, and then there's cake, which has nowhere near the dev support of the other two.
4. Rails wins here if your starting from scratch, but since so many devs already have php experience, complexity becomes sort of relative.
5. For better or worse, if you were to poll most devs that are building commercial production apps (at least out of the three options mentioned) php5 is going to win hands down. For my company it was a simple decision that hinges on two of the points: scaling and experience. We wanted something to scale to slashdot numbers, while being able to hire a bunch of kids from college to help the dev team build it all. Typical of online startups, we wanted the most bang for the bucks, and php5 was the choice.

P.S. A similar question of Rails vs PHP vs Java question was somewhat subjectively discussed late last year http://www.cmswire.com/cms/industry-news/php-vs-ja va-vs-ruby-000887.php

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:Brrrr...

[@madeus]

Compare a straightforward Java class, with try/catch (a silly example, but obviously just to provide some syntax):

public class DoStuff {
    protected double someNumber;

    public setSomeNumber( double number ) {
        try {
            someNumber = number;
        } catch (Exception e) {
            // See e.getMessage() for error
        }
    }
}

... with some PHP for the same code, which would look like this:

public class DoStuff {
    private someNumber;

    public setSomeNumber($number) {
        try {
            $this->someNumber = $number;
        } catch (Exception $e) {
            // See $e->getMessage() for error
        }
    }
}

I don't see how that's wacky syntax in the slightest. Just people people use PHP like it's Perl+Mason doesn't mean you can't use PHP for serious, scaleable, enterprise software. I know from experience that people are just as likely to write nasty Perl, Ruby or ASP as they are nasty PHP.

Personally I think Java makes it more difficult to be wacky (even though of course it can't force people to write code that's ultimately good) and that has definite benefits in an enterprise environment, but that lack of flexibility (which scripting languages like Perl and PHP have) is also why I don't tend to want to use Java.

It makes little sense to say Rails doesn't scale..

[patio11]

... when the complaint is similar to "PHP is a really cruddy language to write a graphics driver in". This is true -- using PHP to write a graphics driver is like attempting to change a car tire with a banana, but thats hardly a knock on PHP, its just a mostly banal comment on choosing the right tool for the job. What Rails excels in is choosing the right job for the tool -- given that you have Rails, you now know with pretty good certainty that you can bang out a CRUD site in your target vertical of choice on a very nice timescale while still being feature-rich. That is a really, really nice feature for a platform to have for small software houses.

Granted, I wouldn't write Digg in it, but *I'll never write Digg in anything*. Neither will 99% of the world's programmers, and for the 1% that are making social networking sitse with desired user numbers the size of nation states, they have the LAMP stack and God bless them for it.

As for me, I've got one quite profitable desktop application written in Java (folks laughed at me for that -- what can I say, it got the job done) and am having a bloody ball working on a small business vertical app which, at $15 / account / month and low predicted need for users to interact with the app, would replace my day job income at about three dynamic page hits per hour. I have this funny feeling that Rails will scale that far.

language, framework, framework

[fozzmeister]

PHP5 is a language, the other two are frameworks. So it can't really be compared. The Zend Framework is a very non-limiting non-rigid framework (it's much more like a bunch of really good libraries atm) which might make the comparison viable.

Re:Sure

[VirusEqualsVeryYes]

this absolute shit [for] an IT story [has] nothing more than a link to a wikipedia article in the summary!

Not to worry, you will be cured of your tendency to RTFA soon. Welcome to Slashdot.

Re:Sure

[dk.r*nger]

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.

You could, you know, link to those "way too many blogs" and thus let the rest of us decide for ourselves if this is incriminating evidence against Ruby.

"I read it on a blog" does not in any way imply truth.
"I read it on many blogs" doesn't really make it much better.

And until then, you shall remain a troll. After you post the links, you'll have your status upgraded to "person with an opinion, willing to discuss".

Perl advocates should try CATALYST

[jorgegv]

I find it strange that nobody yet has given a reference to Catalyst, the best MVC framework for Perl. From people that have tried both (not me), it is said to be the equivalent of RoR for Perl. I can't back that because I'm a perl monk and I don't have time for yet another language (what for, when you have already tried the best language ? ;-)

Application skeleton and database CRUD in 30 seconds (measured!!!). Try it.

Symfony (PHP 5 Framework), Notes on other Webkits

[Qbertino]

As many have pointed out allready, PHP (incl. PHP 5) is a subset of CakePHP, as it is - Tadaa! - a PHP Framework. So if you run Cake on PHP 5 (it runs on both PHP 4 and PHP 5) then you've got both.
There are a lot of Frameworks recommended here, such as Django, Turbogears and others. They are all very neat. I'd like to add Zope (or it's superset Plone) to that list as it is the oldest and most mature of all these neat OSS Webkits.

Rails is the first project that emphatically applied marketing tactics to make itself popular, thus the extreme hype surrounding it and the potential critical mass it has gained. It's simular to the hype Zend is putting behind it's Zend Framework right now. Which is also way overhyped with bold claims despite being less than a year old. However Rails is *not* the Framework that invented or first implemented MVC, Scaffolding or all the other concepts associated with it.

A Webdevelopers 2 cents.

Feature, concept and technology wise Zope (built with Python) is still unmatched by any other Framework or Appserver available, be it in Python, Ruby, Java or whatever.

CakePHP is a good Framework - I'm using on PHP 5 it just now to build a larger custom CRM System - and the community is fun (no Forum - we all hang out on IRC) but I recommend Symfony, as it is built entirely on PHP 5 no extra work added for PHP 4 compliance, covers aspects of it job by integrating existing Projects such as Creole and Propel for the DB stuff and it has very good documentation. Including a very well written Book (free PDF version available). Symfony is mature and has been successfully used in very large scale Projects (Yahoo Bookmarks is built on it).

Bottom Line: I'd be carefull not to blindly follow the rabid hypers of Rails or their fresh PHP equivalent, the Zend Framework bandwagon crew. Check out the Frameworks people have mentioned here and if you want to stick to PHP 5 Cake or Symfony are both fine choices.

Re:Sure

[dedazo]

Sure. Here's a quote from an interview with the guy that created Twitter:

How has Ruby on Rails been holding up to the increased load?

By various metrics Twitter is the biggest Rails site on the net right now. Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling issues - issues that any growing site eventually contends with - far sooner than I think we would on another framework.The common wisdom in the Rails community at this time is that scaling Rails is a matter of cost: just throw more CPUs at it. The problem is that more instances of Rails (running as part of a Mongrel cluster, in our case) means more requests to your database. At this point in time there's no facility in Rails to talk to more than one database at a time. The solutions to this are caching the hell out of everything and setting up multiple read-only slave databases, neither of which are quick fixes to implement. So it's not just cost, it's time, and time is that much more precious when people can['t] reach your site. None of these scaling approaches are as fun and easy as developing for Rails. All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise. Once you hit a certain threshold of traffic, either you need to strip out all the costly neat stuff that Rails does for you (RJS, ActiveRecord, ActiveSupport, etc.) or move the slow parts of your application out of Rails, or both.It's also worth mentioning that there shouldn't be doubt in anybody's mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow. It's great that people are hard at work on faster implementations of the language, but right now, it's tough. If you're looking to deploy a big web application and you're language-agnostic, realize that the same operation in Ruby will take less time in Python. All of us working on Twitter are big Ruby fans, but I think it's worth being frank that this isn't one of those relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow.

Is that specific enough for you?

And until then, you shall remain a troll.

Would you like some salt to go with your crow? Let me know.

Re:Sure

[CastrTroy]

A bit of advice. Use PDO. Don't use MySQL or MySQLi functions. This will not only make your life a little easier if you ever need to switch database engines, but I also find that it makes doing prepared queries much easier (although it's possible with MySQLi). Being mostly a .Net developer, I find it hillarious and sad that most PHP tutorials recommend using the mysql_ functions, along with mysql_real_escape_str() function for doing database queries. One interface for all databases makes a lot more sense, and using prepared queries protects against SQL injection in a way that trying to remember to use mysql_real_escape in every query can't come close to.

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.

Re:Sure

[GrievousMistake]

Sure, just log in, go to preferences -> homepage, and uncheck the box that says 'kdawson'. The slashdot admins will instantly take notice of your preference and kick him of the team, and with any luck you'll never hear from him again.