Until last week, I kind of thought moving to Ruby on Rails was stupid for long time developers in another language (like me) - what was the point of learning a totally new language?

Well until Friday night, when I was reading some article about Rails (I forget what it was), I suddenly got a burst of “lets have a look!”. I typed rubyonrails.com into my browser, and continued to look at the screencasts and the rest of the site/wiki for a while, until deciding I would in fact try it - I had nothing to loose! I downloaded it and got RadRails (an IDE for rails), then started doing the really basic stuff, like creating projects, doing some Hello Worlds’ - all looked great, and the simple MVC file structure was easy to understand after using CakePHP! By this time it was already 4am, and while I was very much excited to carry on, I needed rest.

Saturday I just watched screencasts all afternoon. Ruby is a very clean language, and rails continues it and I soon realized how long time ruby developers thought code from another language was messy. CakePHP tried very hard to make it look nicer, but at the end of the day, its still built on PHP, which I can even agree is kind of “messy”, don’t even get me started on the bad naming of functions. (just something you learn to live with, and get used to after a while)

I thought best to actually do some coding on Sunday, see what it felt like - it was great, the simple stuff I picked up from the screen casts was becoming natural, the database migrates were pretty simple, and apart from Rails 2.0 messing up 99% of beginners tutorials by totally changing how it did scaffolding, it was pretty neat!

The reality of things for me…

That was, until my full on Rails excitement wore off and I realised 3+ years of PHP development, plus all the classes I have made which can be reused, and the overwhelming wealth of other php classes on the Internet to basically do anything, was all gone, and replaced with “plugins” and “gems”, plus me having to get experienced enough with ruby to do exactly what I needed to do, fast, on my own. Last year when I first tried CakePHP, it was such a joy, because if I really wanted too, I could scrap every code neatening tool and just use it as a simple MVC framework with my own PHP and SQL queries. It felt like everything people were saying at the time about rails, but still with the great accessibility of PHP. I guess that’s the point of quite a few PHP frameworks.

“Rails hater!!”

Now, please don’t think this is a Ruby/Rails hate post, I LOVE them both, they are simply so clean and nice, and I really wish I had followed the hype a few years ago when I was a beginner at PHP also, then maybe by now Ruby would be my main web development language. But that’s not the case, leaving PHP is hard.

Going back and advice…

I would really like to learn Ruby fully one day, so I have the confidence to say anything can be done in it, by me. But for now, my feet are back where I started - CakePHP!

But for somebody with time on their hands and a love for web development, Ruby on Rails is great, try it! Just remember - Ruby on Rails can’t do anything more than another language! Especially PHP.

A few things I bookmarked are in my Del.icio.us profile, if you do decide to try it!