

Outside.In Scales Up - Case Study - PHP to Rails - jiparker
http://engineyard.com/about/customers/outsidein

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adrianh
Self-promotional post alert! This is from jiparker.com, the homepage of the
guy who posted this item:

"After almost 10 years at Ameren as a developer, I will be taking an Account
Manager position with the internet start up Engine Yard out of San Francisco."

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mariorz
who cares? The post is either good or it isn't, where the poster works or his
intentions are unimportant.

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jbm
This really has no business being on the site. I program in both PHP and Ruby,
but there are no bench marks or explanations as to why the company needed to
switch to Rails. What was the problem in PHP that they couldn't solve that
needed a complete port? What were the "architectural" problems that required
the expensive & time-consuming process of switching languages?

Without any kind of data or insight into the train of thought behind the
change, this falls into the infotainment /advertising category. We can do
better than this.

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jamongkad
Perhaps it's for maintenance reasons? Who knows probably the first iteration
of their site was the standard PHP + SQL+ HTML format.

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jbm
Is it really that hard to create maintainable PHP code? I've been guilty of
making spaghetti code myself, but after a little studying and re-learning the
stuff I learned in college, I improved measurably in a matter of weeks.

It isn't so hard to write maintainable PHP code; although maybe the nature of
this application was different. If they had written the rationale, I wouldn't
have any of these questions :(

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jamongkad
While I agree with you on your premise I'm sitting next to a guy on the
cubicle to my left writing a mediumish CMS for a client in the usual PHP sort
of way. Although his code is nicely indented and formatted for reading. He's
having a hella of a time navigating his code base(which is like what? 3000
LOC) when the client requests for simple changes.

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jonknee
This is simply an ad for Engine Yard.

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kapitti
Not a very good one - the site is slow as hell right now.

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aditya
Here's the actual blog post: [http://blog.outside.in/2008/01/22/outsidein-
switches-to-rail...](http://blog.outside.in/2008/01/22/outsidein-switches-to-
rails/)

PS. Disclaimer: I work at outside.in too :)

