
Ask HN: Is PHP/MySQL Still Practical for Building Web Applications? - jakerocheleau
I ask because there are so many open source projects based on PHP code, but from what I've read RoR is faster and easier to work with. I'd like to get opinions on the matter to reference for future decisions in startup development
======
dangrossman
You can just as easily say RoR is slower (than, say, Symfony 2.0 on PHP with
an opcode cache) and harder to work with (from a system administration
perspective).

Take a look down the top 100 website list, and of those sites that are web
applications, more of them will be built on PHP than not. I don't think
there's even a Ruby application among the top 100 sites except parts of
Twitter, but I could be forgetting something.

\- Facebook

\- Yahoo! (Answers, Bookmarks, Delicious, etc)

\- Wikipedia

\- WordPress (.com application is #19, another 14 million active installs of
the free software)

\- Flickr

It may not be _cool_ right now, but it's certainly _practical_.

~~~
vital101
It's extremely important to draw a distinction between cool and practical. HN
is all about the cool new hotness. People here are always on the bleeding edge
of technology, so they tend to flock towards those instead.

Also, hiring PHP developers is easier than <insert cool technology here>
developers. There are just more people with PHP knowledge. Not saying that is
a good reason to use a language, but it is a factor.

~~~
yaubi
But when it comes to hiring _good_ developers, Python/Ruby/Lisp are definitely
a better option.

In my experience, while it seemed at first that hiring PHP developers would be
easier, it actually proved wrong, as we had to spend way more time to find
_good_ developers among the mass than we would have if we were looking for,
says, Python developers.

------
TamDenholm
My personal opinion is that a project can be language agnostic. You can build
in whatever you want. It doesn't matter if you build your app in php, ruby,
python, asp or whatever, if you're a good coder you will produce good secure
code, if you suck, so will your code.

So build in whatever you're most comfortable with and don't pick a language
because of a superficial reason.

~~~
Ramone
Isn't this the opposite of "pick the right tool for the job"? Building with
whatever you're most comfortable seems to be a superficial reason. Different
platforms/languages have real diversity in their strengths and weaknesses.

~~~
iuguy
You raise a valid point if you're putting up a shelf. But if you're
programming then you'll be at a disadvantage if you're not familiar with the
tools at hand. Even a designer is going to suffer if they're made to use the
Gimp when they're used to Photoshop, not because Gimp is or isn't a good tool
but because the interaction is different.

Switching from Lightroom to Aperture I've noticed substantial differences in
my photography, and I'm not a very good photographer. I'm considering
switching back to Lightroom - I'm sure Aperture's great, but the learning
curve is harder than switching from Vim to Emacs.

------
apinstein
I am a 15-year veteran of PHP and am still using it to build apps. Why?
Because I have 15 years' of experience, and nothing surprises me anymore. I
can fix nearly any bug in a very short time. Also, it's fast, mature, proven,
and rock-solid, and I don't spend much time worrying about the surrounding
infrastructure.

I haven't switched to Ruby personally yet because I am too busy to worry about
having to spend hours/days dealing with issues that are new to me. OTOH I am
allowing developers on my team to found new projects in Ruby since they
already know the stack and I certainly have no aversion to learning new
things.

PHP isn't a great language for applying the latest metaprogramming techniques
and other modern patterns that make life easier. Although PHP 5.3 makes that
much better with the addition of lambda, it's still tough to do certain types
of patterns or write easily testable code in some circumstances. Mixins are
also still a bit tricky since there's no language built-in for doing them.

However, some of the RFC's on grafts and traits are very promising in this
regard, and frankly I think these patterns are better than doing the same in
metaprogramming b/c the compiler can help you instead of delaying all errors
to runtime.

In any case, if you don't already have lots of PHP experience I would
recommend choosing a different language to build your knowledge base on. Ruby,
python, clojure, javascript any of the other "hot" languages of today that
attract lots of attention and offer a clear path in the future built on a
solid foundation.

------
chriseidhof
I've built a large application in CakePHP (and had plenty of PHP experience
before that). For most things, it worked well. Last week, I started doing RoR
again (after a couple of years), and it beats the hell out of any other
ecosystem for webdevelopment. Ruby is (for me) a much better language than
PHP. I've done a lot of Haskell, too, and Haskell is even a better language
than Ruby, but doesn't have the same amount of web developers.

What's nice about Ruby is that there is a huge ecosystem. Ruby on Rails is
already very complete (especially compared to PHP). There are a lot of plugins
for Rails that add the functionality you want. For example: adding image
uploads (including thumbnail generation) was about 15 minutes of work, adding
comments to my models too, and voting on models/comments was also done by
installing a plugin. In PHP, there's a lot of code available, but most of it
doesn't integrate automatically with other code.

I think that the amount of smart people that are working on a
language/framework is very important. In Haskell, for example, there are not
too many people working on web frameworks, and there's still a lot missing or
broken. In PHP, there are a lot of people working on the language/frameworks,
but a lot of the smart developers have moved to other tools, such as
Rails/Django/etc. Therefore, I would just follow them and use a framework like
Rails.

(A slight warning: this is all very subjective, this post is not based on any
objective facts)

~~~
boundlessdreamz
slightly offtopic: What did you use voting/commenting ? When I last looked
none of the plugins in that area were maintained

~~~
chriseidhof
One of my friends pointed me to this site: <http://ruby-toolbox.com/>, it's
great for finding maintained plugins.

To answer your question: I used thumbs_up for voting, acts_as_commentable for
comments, clearance for authentication and paperclip for file uploads.

I found thumbs_up before I knew of ruby-toolbox: I went to the
acts_as_voteable github page, clicked on "Network" and scrolled to the right
as far as possible. Most rubyists are very active on github, and a lot of the
packages are forked.

~~~
boundlessdreamz
Thank you :) I was looking for something that integrates rating (not voting)
and commenting in one package. I found this
<https://github.com/grimen/is_reviewable> through the toolbox. But last commit
is from 2009. Hopefully someone has forked it or I will have to fix it

~~~
xiongchiamiov
Abandoned gems is one of the biggest problems I have with Ruby. Rubygems is
starting to look like CPAN, which makes my sysadmin life hell.

------
michaelhart
While RoR is getting better in this respect, PHP is vastly better documented
(both officially and all throughout the web) and the community is (at least,
for now) superior to RoR. This is something that simply requires more time for
RoR, as PHP has had quite a few years head start to get to where it is.

In practice, it honestly boils down to what you're doing and what's easier for
you (and your team). If you want to test the waters, follow a few tutorials
for each that you're unfamiliar with, and see what suits you better.

If you're using a shared server, you also have to make sure that your host
supports RoR (most hosts don't). So that could be an extra expense to
consider.

Me personally: I'm a php person. I prefer PHP + CodeIgniter, and I'm all happy
:) RoR is fine and dandy, imo, but wasn't worth 9 years of PHP experience when
PHP works amazingly well for everything I've ever asked of it.

~~~
ryan-allen
I've run server ops (and do development) for significantly loaded RoR and PHP
applications (and still do), and I can say that there is more quality
information available for RoR than there is PHP for setting up high scale and
stable setups.

When setting up a RoR stack, all the information I needed was available, the
infrastructure was pretty stable and was easy to debug problems. PHP on the
other hand, had close to no information on dealing with high load. The
optcache libraries are poorly documented, nobody is really talking about it,
and running anything but Apache (for performance, of course) under fcgi was
horrifically problematic.

In the end we had to write our own monitoring tools to deal with all the
oddities we discovered with the standard fcgi spawner (there were many), and
when trying to mitigate memory leaks we discover that there are 'many known
leaks in the PHP stdlib, but that's OK because everyone runs short-lived
processes and restarts them regularly so we don't need to fix them'. My idea
of a robust (fcgi) server would be that it doesn't require constant restarts,
but that's just me.

RoR is only _one_ framework in the vast number of Ruby libraries. I have
worked in both technologies and there are more well designed, useful and
current libraries and tools surrounding Ruby than there are PHP.

Quite honestly I'm sick of people apologising for it and pointing to the 'big
players in web' as proof that PHP is OK. In my opinion it really needs to go
away. In the years I worked with it, it taught me nothing but bad habits. I'm
not the only one.

EDIT: Two Ruby libraries I used recently that were very high quality were
Nokogiri (HTML/XML parsing) and Typhoeus (HTTP library wrapping libcurl). I
don't recall ever seeing anything like those in PHP that had such intuitive
APIs. Can anyone provide any counterpoints of better libraries in PHP that
don't exist in Ruby? P.S. Wordpress is not an answer.

~~~
jarin
I highly disagree that PHP has more quality information available than Ruby on
Rails. Any time I've ever looked for anything on PHP all I get is
ExpertsExchange quality (with the occasional gem on Stack Overflow), but a
search for nearly any problem in Rails turns up a multitude of amazing blog
posts, Google Groups posts, or gems that solve my exact problem. Failing that,
IRC (or just digging through Ruby code which is easier to read than almost any
language I have worked with) has been very helpful.

------
sp4rki
A big part of the reason that many of the biggest sites websites on the net
now are made in Php, is because it was the most viable and popular option 5
years ago. In that time both Ruby and Python have made leaps of advances in
using their technology for web development. Now both languages are faster than
Php, and in general the popular frameworks in this languages also preach
better practices.

I worked with Php for a couple of years and I can tell you that I absolutely
thought the language was a melting pot of some great ideas with a huge bunch
of WTF form the very beginning. In my opinion Php as a language is archaic and
the only reason to use it now is because it makes sense for your team (because
that's what your team has experience with). That being said, a good developer
gets great stuff out the door regardless of what language they use to do so.
Hell one of best developers I know is a Php junkie - with whom I always ended
up having a slight language war with. The funny thing is that even tough he
was the strongest Php advocate I know, he is now using Python for everything
and agrees that it's a _much_ better language.

Now I work almost exclusively with Ruby for webdevelopment (and also for a big
part of my server scripts now that I mention it) because it just makes sense.
The code is a lot more maintainable and scalable, though this is because it's
generally the case that out of a batch of Ruby developers you will probably
get more 'good' developers than out of a batch of Php developers with the same
amount of people. It's my experience that its easy to get 50 Php developers,
out of which only a couple are actually good ones, while if you get 10 Ruby
devs, at least half are competent.

This rant is getting long so I'll just leave you with a thought. If the only
developers you can get right now are Php devs, it makes sense to do your
project in Php; however, if it's possible for you to get your hands on some
Ruby or Python developers, you really can't go wrong by choosing either over
Php, specially since doing so will generally have the benefits of a faster,
better, and more maintainable codebase.

------
qixxiq
I find the hardest problem to overcome with PHP is finding developers, as it
isn't a particularly nice language to work with.

If you're not doing a computationally expensive startup, speed won't matter
much. If you ever get to the size where it does (i.e. Facebook) - there are
always solutions.

I've been seriously considering trying to start up an alternative language
that takes the best parts out of PHP, but drops all the backwards compatible
nonsense. It really has some great features but the annoyances will scare off
most top developers - and you're left with a crowd of 85% script kiddies and
only 15% developers that actually learnt to use the language properly... and
trying to find one of those 15% isnt easy.

~~~
bilban
That would be Python!

------
ryanto
It all comes down to the code. Good code in a bad language is better than bad
code in a great language. The nice thing about RoR is it kinda forces you to
do a few 'best practices things' so even newbie developers tend to end up with
'ok' code. Of course, there are many PHP frameworks that also apply this sort
of way of coding.

Also, note that there will be a learning curve (probably small, but you will
notice it) when you first start learning rails. Like all new languages, you'll
overcome this eventually.

There is really no reason to choose one or the other. You basically already
know the answer. Whenever people ask me this question I say 'What do you think
the pros/cons are for each language?' and then right after they list them I
say 'ok, pick one'. This is really not a subject worth dwelling on with
established languages/frameworks.

PS: If it were me, I'd choose RoR :)

~~~
itsnotvalid
What's the worst is bad code in a bad language. Having a web framework would
make things much more systematic, while raw speed is going to be a hit on
(compare raw PHP with CakePHP 1.1, for example).

------
morganpyne
Absolutely. The point has been made here already, but PHP + (Framework of your
choice) + MySQL can still be used to produce great web applications quickly
and easily. My framework of choice happens to be Symfony, but there are many
good options. I also really like Compass for CSS and Capistrano for deployment
(both borrowed from the Ruby folks) and that's fine too; they don't require
any server-side Ruby support to be useful.

I would argue that a lot of the frameworks seem to be converging in ideas and
functionality and borrowing heavily from each other, so whether you use
PHP/Symfony, Ruby/Rails, Python/Django or whatever you probably will have more
shared core concepts across them than differences. I think that a more
interesting question would be "Is PHP/MySQL still practical for building web
applications _if I don't use a framework?_ " And the answer there is "that
depends..." :-)

------
davidedicillo
It's about the developer, not the language. Just write good code and the
language at the beginning won't really make a difference. If you like rails
but you are more comfortable with PHP, maybe you could try CakePHP or
Codeigniter. Even Python/Django could be an option you should consider.

Also for RoR you could use Heroku that makes deployment a breeze, but
definitely when it comes to resources Ruby is way more expensive than PHP.

------
LeBlanc
PHP is not equivalent to Rails. It would be more accurate to compare PHP to
Ruby and compare Rails to a PHP framework like Kohana.

I've worked with both Kohana and Rails. Rails is more popular so it is easier
to find solutions and add-ons. However, it does a lot of things by 'magic' and
a beginner will have a hard time modifying rails source or creating a gem (if
they want to do something non-default). Kohana on the other hand is easier to
understand, extend, and modify, because the entire source is in your project
folder as PHP code.

Good luck!

------
mojuba
One nice thing about PHP is that despite its archaism it keeps growing as a
language. The 5.3 release alone added anonymous functions, namespaces, consts
and many internal improvements. I recently rewrote one of my projects from the
4.x era for version 5.3 and found myself thinking that I don't hate PHP so
much anymore. I still don't like it either, but at least I know the language
is in good hands anyway.

~~~
xiongchiamiov
The problem is that they add them without breaking any backwards
compatability, so you end up with unpleasantries like the \ namespace
separator.

~~~
mojuba
On the other hand breaking compatibility the way they did with Python 3 is
reckless. Ask someone who has a huge code base with, say, test scripts that do
'print' a lot if they are eager to switch to Python 3.

~~~
xiongchiamiov
That's an easy enough fix, and one that's handled quite well by 2to3. In fact,
2to3 handles most things, although there is of course some stuff that needs to
be done by humans. But that stuff is certainly not 'print'.

------
oemera
Lately these questions and discussions are everywhere and most times I think
people are missing the point: it's all about code you want to write.

We created all those high level languages to make code easy to read, to make
them people understand. I mean you could probably write your website in
Assembla but the language won't help you to write down what you really want.

As a developer you are trying to develop something you do not want to mess
around with a language. The language you use should help you focus on what you
want to develop not distracting you with "ugly" code.

If you understand what the code is doing (even if you coded it on your own you
sometimes have to think about what is going on there) it lets you help to
focus on your goals.

If you brain works better with PHP code you should probably use PHP as your
coding language but if not you should try something else like Python, Ruby or
maybe Haskel until you find a language which is boosting you while developing.
Don't get me wrong I don't say a programming language should do everything for
you while you are drinking coffee. No, it should help you to think better what
to implement next and how to implement it. It should support you while reading
and understanding.

Again, we only created all those high level languages to make it easier to
understand.

And now my standpoint to PHP: I don't like PHP cause it is a noisy language
IMO. PHP is not OOP. You can use OOP in PHP 5 but the PHP core is not OOP so
this seems weird. Even in PHP 5 you can't get a string length like:
$str->length No you have to use strlen($str) and this is ugly.

Also I don't like those "symbols" PHP is using (maybe symbols are not the
correct word here but I can't find a better fitting word at the moment). In
PHP you have variable names with a $ symbol. Why? I don't know but this
doesn't work for human beings cause human brains are assuming the dollar
symbol has something to do with money or numbers but in PHP it's not. So you
have to getting used to it.

It's really the same with the "dot" symbol in PHP. You wouldn't expect that
it's concatenating strings.

Ruby as language is for me like reading a book. For example you can write code
like this: if user.has_comments? ... end

That's why I love Ruby and I would prefer working with RoR for my project
cause it helps you on rapid development.

One last thing: Ruby lets your focus on what you want to build without noise
that's why (IMO) there are so much gems and a really huge community!

(Sorry for my bad english, it's not my primary language. I'm working on it :)

EDIT: corrected some typos.

~~~
hardy263
Informative: I believe the term you are referring to is Sigil
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigil_(computer_programming)>

I actually never found having the dollar sign as a sigil was any problem.
There are a lot of punctuation symbols used in programming that are not used
the same way as they are used in English grammar. In English, you don't create
a new paragraph for every line indented in, the ^ sign is not often used for
exclusive or, % is not used for modulus, and * is not used for multiplication.

You could also probably make a length function which returns strlen($str) if
you really wanted to have $str->length.

~~~
bilban
I like the dollar prefix for variables. But each to their own.

------
makuro
These answers are all pretty long. The answer is yes, definitely, without a
doubt. Practical means "for use in practice" and PHP powers a lot of your
daily web applications, especially the simpler ones. Judging from your
question text, at your skill level, PHP is sufficient if not ideal for
development, deployment, and performance.

MySQL is also fast and easy.

------
joelhaasnoot
Launching a new site on the PHP/MySQL combo (with CakePHP as the framework) on
monday so there better not be.

I do have to say, being a single coder/sysadmin/tech-cofounder, it has been an
uphill battle and really it's a full-time job, but I make do with a couple of
hours on the side as a student.

------
prateekdayal
I have been doing RoR for over three years now and absolutely love it. A few
things make it great

* The best practices are well documented and if you follow them, you are gonna end up with good code. Good code helps you iterate faster (and with more confidence) and thats crucial when building a startup.

* There is pretty good documentation available and tons of great books that you can read. Also with every release, it gets easier to do things in Rails. Ofcourse you should have test coverage to make sure that you can upgrade rails easily. This basically boils down to the first advice about following best practices.

Basically to get most out of rails, you have to buy their philosophy and
follow the best practices. If you do, you can be assured of great productivity
and programmer joy :)

------
jeffreymcmanus
If you are a software entrepreneur as opposed to an individual coder, one of
the things you have to consider is how easy it is to hire someone who knows
the platform or language you've selected. It's a fact that in the US and
around the world, PHP developers outnumber Ruby developers by a significant
margin, probably at least an order of magnitude.

In some ways, this may seem like an unfair comparison (by way of analogy,
pedestrians outnumber drivers around the world as well). This doesn't address
whether Ruby is "better" or not than PHP (or Smalltalk, etc.), it only has to
do with what a startup engineering manager will have to contend with if an
when your startup gets traction and you need to start hiring people at a
particular moment in time.

~~~
adaml_623
But you have to ask yourself what your new hires are going to be bringing to
your company? Are you going to be hiring dinosaurs or mammals?

~~~
jeffreymcmanus
I'm not sure what this means, but I think it reflects an incorrect bias that
everyone you ever hire must necessarily be "plug and play". This assumes that
humans are not educable which is not the case with the possible exception of
certain conservative legislators.

------
macco
PHP is totally fine. The question is more: Do you like, do you want to work
with PHP, or do you want to work with Python, Ruby, Smalltalk, Lisp, etc.

~~~
jakerocheleau
By the sounds of it Python or Ruby seem to be the best options. I've done
light PHP work for a year or two before but wouldn't say I'm an expert of any
sort. Thus why I'm so open to switching into learning a more "modern" language

------
volkadav
I do have some future-direction worries about php (the 6 dev process has had
some ... quirks; like "let's just bin this and start over") and mysql (re:
acquisition by oracle and ensuing staff departures, forked projects, etc.).
But they're still fine for a proof of concept implementation. Not many
architectures survive contact with real use unchanged, so having to buttress
(e.g. op code or data caching) or swap out components entirely is not unheard
of. Sometimes the best way to understand a system is to build it, so even if
you do end up rebuilding it in whole or in part, at least you've learned the
hard lessons about how everything hangs together to make it work right.

PHP and mysql are dead stupid easy to get started with. An mvc framework like
symfony/kohana/zend/etc. can help speed dev time for your PoC, but most of
them are performance hogs so you'll probably have to buttress that (APC,
memcache, etc.) if you do end up having to scale. All this stuff's widely
supported and retarded easy to deploy usually.

RoR is a bit more of a moving target at the moment. Which means docs can/do
lag the bleeding edge quite a bit, standard OS distribution packages are
frequently out of date (or just out right retarded e.g. debian's disabling of
rubygem self update), and the best practices for deploying and scaling are in
a state of flux. (I think currently the recommended way is phusion's
passenger/mod_rails or whatever it is, for apache/nginx anyway. Or has the
state of the art moved on again?)

------
nessence
As for the title of your question, sure, PHP/MySQL are stil practical. If the
answer to your question were no, then that would mean companies like Facebook
and Yahoo aren't practical.

With regard to your future decisions, you might strongly consider another
language and framework, not because one is more practical than another, but
because the developers behind that framework may have more of a propensity
towards the context of your startup. So, for example, Ruby has a large web
application community, Python has a large scientific community, and Java
enterprise.

The primary contention behind PHP has largely been it's limited OO and speed,
as compared to it's brethren interpreted languages. You _can_ , creatively, do
advanced things in PHP which are done in other languages, but it's not as
straight forward and often clumsy or not supported. That said, PHP is simple
enough that large implementations can easily modify PHP for their own use;
considering how slow PHP's codebase moves, forward compatibility is far less
of an issue.

All together I wouldn't base your decision on speed. Computing power is cheap
now and all of them are feasible as far as speed is concerned. If you need to
build something NOW, strongly considering going with what you know. If you
have more time, consider writing something cliche like a multi-user blog or
twitter platform with each framework -- you'll be exposed to patterns you
haven't seen before and can also figure out what you like and don't like.

------
rbanffy
Servers are cheap, programmers are expensive and bugs can kill you.

I suggest going with whatever gives you clean and correct code faster. I
wouldn't suggest PHP for a new project. If you already have a big codebase
written in PHP, you should keep it, but by "keep" I mean maintaining and
cleaning up, not only adding to.

As for MySQL, it's good enough unless you get too successful - then it becomes
painful to keep it going. Mostly any RDBMS has this problem. Again, for a new
project, I'd go with PostgreSQL, but that's more a matter of taste.

------
jentulman
Yes it's very practical.

Finding a hosting solution for PHP is not going to be to difficult.

It's not going to 'go away' anytime soon, certainly not before it becomes time
to re-write your codebase.

The docs are good.

Whether or not there is something which does any of those points better does
not change the answer to the actual question. Yes, PHP/MySQL is still
practical for building web apps.

------
scrame
I hate php, and don't really like mysql.

Yes. It is quite practical.

------
simonpreed
Use what makes you happy, building a startup will be have many more pressing
questions than the choice of language. Trying to make sure you use a 'cool'
technology is probably not going to worth the time.

Good luck.

------
iampims
Build your webapp in a way where migrating parts of it to better suited
technologies isn't impossible, and if/when you feel the need to migrate from
PHP/MySQL, you'll be able to do so.

------
troels
Any advise you can get by asking such a broad question, is anecdotal. From a
technical point of view, it usually doesn't matter - You can build
applications on both platforms. If your application is atypical, there might
be a point in picking one over the other, but what really matters is the
people that should work with it. If you have php programmers at hand, using
php is probably a better idea.

------
n-ion
there is another comment that speaks to this ("it comes down to code"), but
i'd just like to say - use what ever you can to get the job done, then think
about porting/optimizing/frameworks...

TO the question at hand - Yes - php and sql can get the job done... i mean are
you building it for 1,000 users? or 100,000? php and sql can handle both...

Code tight and code well, tell everyone else to go to hell

------
noodle
yes. languages are tools. use what you need to get the job done.

if you know PHP and C, it'll be much easier and faster for you to build your
startup with PHP and C, instead of toughing it out learning RoR enough to get
things done. perhaps RoR is "faster" and "easier", but it won't be faster and
easier for you until you're competent with it, and that takes time.

------
paraschopra
Visual Website Optimizer is built on PHP/MySQL stack (but we do use Redis for
queue). And the application is serving 15+ million requests _daily_. So, it is
certainly possible to build a good enough application on PHP/MySQL.

------
abraham
Yes.

~~~
neuotq
Yes. We say Yes PHP

------
ntulip
Oracle just put a price on InnoDB. So unless you got $2000 a year - NO.
<http://www.mysql.com/products/>

Postgresql is your next choice.

~~~
ntulip
FYI: InnoDB is transaction safe. MyISAM being ok for basic things.

~~~
9ec4c12949a4f3
I would say if you're using MyISAM for basic things, you might as well go with
SQLite.

~~~
ntulip
agreed

------
jarin
Practical? Yes. Ideal? Maybe.

There are a lot of really good PHP developers around. But for ease of
development and community support on a brand new project I'd probably go with
Ruby or Python.

------
hedgehog
Your biggest risk is not shipping, use the tools that make you happy and
productive to help get past that as quickly as possible. Solve the rest when
you get there.

------
quattrofan
Having seen first hand the problems of transitioning a busy site built on pure
PHP to ROR and the (ongoing) performance and scaling issues I would be very
careful,

------
phpnode
Yes, just use a good framework like Yii (<http://www.yiiframework.com>) to
smooth out the warts.

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usajag21
Does anyone use WebObjects for developing web applications? Can someone
compare it Python/Ruby for development?

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pornel
Yes, it's practical. I'd use Postgres rather than MySQL if possible.

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thinkingeric
Practical? Yes. Desirable? Depends on who is going to maintain it.

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eberfreitas
Yes

