Why I chose Ruby over PHP
after developing in PHP for more than a decade.
In the in the very early stages of smooster’s development process, I evaluated a lot of frameworks like Zend or Symfony — both based on PHP, as well as Java, Python and Ruby frameworks.
In the end I turned my back on PHP and moved on to Ruby, the reasons for this decision are what I want to talk about today.
Like many Developers, in the beginning I compared features like security and performance. But I think that in the end these parameters should not tip the scales.
Why? Because it’s my firm believe that both security and performance — at least within the well known frameworks and languages — are more based on the knowledge of the developer using it.
I chose Ruby and the Ruby on Rails Framework because of the following reasons:
- Ruby code can be written in an easily readable style, which — combined with Test-driven development — makes an additional code documentation like phpDoc unnecessary.
- Support for Test-Driven-Development is awesome
- Deployment process is easy and smooth
- Bundler and the possibility to set gems with fixed versions saves you a lot of trouble when your hoster upgrades the servers
- There are a lot of great libraries out there. In my opinion the code quality in those open source projects is mostly higher than in the PHP universe. What might also be due to the fact that PHP is more widely spread.
All of this saved us a lot of time and money, not only while developing, but also for maintaining the software.
