7fff – think max value

Rails vs. PHP

Interesting article on Rails vs. PHP:

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/09/7_reasons_i_switched_back_to_p_1.html

Clearly learning Rails was great for the author’s brain; hence, the great pedagogical value of learning Rails even if you end up not using it.

It sounds as though his MVC framework is home-grown. This strikes me as a real problem. While it may be the case that he was able to accomplish his re-write in two months, would a new developer be able to understand the frameworky aspects of the code? Would that developer be able to go to a book to learn how it all works — or transfer the framework knowledge to a new job? If you have a home-grown framework, you’re really doing your developers a disservice. I suppose it’s a strategy for employee lock-in.

One of his reasons for sticking with PHP was his difficulties getting multi-lingual to work in Rails: A definite issue; can’t wait until that objection is finally and completely removed in a standard way…