
PHP developers migrating to RoR - Universal trend? - nurall
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2006/10/09/php-developers-most-likely-to-switch-to-rails/
======
busy_beaver
"I bet most people who use/used PHP got there because it was popular"

This is fairly accurate, but not quite the whole story.

Ascribing PHP's success to "popularity" makes it sound like a simple fashion
statement. The reality is that, due to its popularity, PHP has a ton of
libraries and an enormous base of existing code (ranging from little hacks to
parse a certain data format all the way up to full-blown applications like
MediaWiki). It's not just the language, it's the ecosystem.

That's a real advantage that's often overlooked by those who advocate other
languages. Also, don't forget that PHP hosting is cheap and ubiquitous. Rails,
not so much.

That said, Ruby is catching up pretty fast, and I've been using Ruby (and
sometimes Rails) for any new project that isn't tightly coupled with existing
code. For me, writing Ruby is vastly more pleasant and efficient than writing
PHP, even though I've been using PHP for five years and Ruby for only one.

I still write a lot of Java, too, but JRuby is starting to eat into that
pretty fast. It's an end run around the library/existing code problem.

------
nurall
This post is not current, sorry about that! But its fairly current to
extrapolate the statistic.

What is the current trend, when it comes to the most preferred development
framework? I am sure the open source community has marched forward since Oct
2006.

------
jey
I hope that PHP developers would realize that PHP is atrocious and just run
away from PHP. RoR is pretty popular right now, so I'm sure a bunch would land
on RoR, and it'd be a serious upgrade. :-) I bet most people who use/used PHP
got there because it was popular, and not because they compared the relative
merits of the languages.

------
russ
This post is definitely old. Anyway, I've never really done any serious PHP
(I'm a Ruby/Rails hacker), but for those that have, have any of you checked
out Code Igniter (<http://codeigniter.com)?> Opinions? On the surface it looks
very similar to RoR.

------
eli
Well, yeah, of course people using a popular open-source web platform are
going to be the ones interested in a different open-source web platform.

Now if VB programmers started switching, that'd be something.

------
whacked_new
I'm curious, how long does a migration take? As in, being reasonably familiar
with another language, you decide to port to or program in a different
language, which you have little prior exposure to.

------
vlad
By the end of this year, a lot of shared hosting providers should be upgrading
to CPanel 11, which has the same built-in support for Ruby as it does for PHP.

