I have been using rails for a little over a year, shortly after it came out. This website that is featured on the example applications page on the RoR site was built by me http://yakimaherald.com. And I can assure you it is much much more than just some li tags.
With all the power that the rails framework gives you, you can build very big sites with a smaller team. this saves on development costs and on your sanity. I wrote the Yakima Herald website by myself in 2.5 months. Can you build something with this much dynamic data with PHP in that time frame with PHP? i think not. in fact I know not because the old website was in PHP. It was 5500 lines of php code. The new site is 2200 lines of ruby/rails code including comprehensive unit and functional tests. Plus it has like 4 times the functionality of the old php site.
That site pulls data from 4 distinct sources.
1. a local postgresql db for CMS and admin functionality.
2. A proprietary BaseEdit NewsRoom Database
3. AP news wire xml feeds that come in base64 encoded and get a major cleanup and reformat before getting displayed.
4. And feeds from the Seattle Times(our parent company)
It does all that and is still very fast. Check it out. You will see that it is more performant then most php applications of its calibre.
I am not a ruby/rails cheerleader. i'm just a 6 year veteran PHP programmer that has found a better tool and decided to be pragmatic about it.
You can find a complete write up of the dev and delpoy process for the Yakima Herald site here on my blog: YakimaHerald.com Write Up
If you are not interested in new exciting tools that help you get your job done *much* quicker then please don't try rails and stay with your status quo. I will be here getting the new exciting jobs using a technology that has brought the fun back into web development for me and many others.
If someone adds columns to your table a normal rails app will happily continue to work and ignore those extra columns until you deem it necessary to add them to your system.
This framework is very nice. If your looking to get away from the sometimes mess of php web development, then this is a great choice. Ruby is a very expressive and powerful language that is very easy to read and code. And also very easy to make wrappers for c libraries. The rails framework does make it _very_ fast to develop MVC web apps with a small amount of intuitive code. And the rubyonrails mailing list is very active and friendly.
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I have been using rails for a little over a year, shortly after it came out. This website that is featured on the example applications page on the RoR site was built by me http://yakimaherald.com. And I can assure you it is much much more than just some li tags.
With all the power that the rails framework gives you, you can build very big sites with a smaller team. this saves on development costs and on your sanity. I wrote the Yakima Herald website by myself in 2.5 months. Can you build something with this much dynamic data with PHP in that time frame with PHP? i think not. in fact I know not because the old website was in PHP. It was 5500 lines of php code. The new site is 2200 lines of ruby/rails code including comprehensive unit and functional tests. Plus it has like 4 times the functionality of the old php site.
That site pulls data from 4 distinct sources.
1. a local postgresql db for CMS and admin functionality.
2. A proprietary BaseEdit NewsRoom Database
3. AP news wire xml feeds that come in base64 encoded and get a major cleanup and reformat before getting displayed.
4. And feeds from the Seattle Times(our parent company)
It does all that and is still very fast. Check it out. You will see that it is more performant then most php applications of its calibre.
I am not a ruby/rails cheerleader. i'm just a 6 year veteran PHP programmer that has found a better tool and decided to be pragmatic about it.
You can find a complete write up of the dev and delpoy process for the Yakima Herald site here on my blog:
YakimaHerald.com Write Up
If you are not interested in new exciting tools that help you get your job done *much* quicker then please don't try rails and stay with your status quo. I will be here getting the new exciting jobs using a technology that has brought the fun back into web development for me and many others.
If someone adds columns to your table a normal rails app will happily continue to work and ignore those extra columns until you deem it necessary to add them to your system.
Actually the dev kits cost $999 but the subscription to the ADC is only $500 not $1500 like you said.
This framework is very nice. If your looking to get away from the sometimes mess of php web development, then this is a great choice. Ruby is a very expressive and powerful language that is very easy to read and code. And also very easy to make wrappers for c libraries. The rails framework does make it _very_ fast to develop MVC web apps with a small amount of intuitive code. And the rubyonrails mailing list is very active and friendly.