The Wonsys Blog

When we were still developing in PHP, we used to work altogether on the same project. Because of this, we could only work on one or maybe two projects at once.

The reason was very clear: PHP kinda made everything a tad more complex, thus the need to be working altogether on the same piece of code.
Sure, you can develop a PHP app all alone, and we’ve done that, but when your app is more than just a simple blogging engine, it starts to get difficult if you’ve got clients waiting for you to the deliver their websites in time.

So you can imagine when we started looking into Rails, it was developer’s Nirvana. We immediately realized it didn’t get in our way: we were finally able to think about how to solve a problem without having to worry how to put it in code — and that’s mostly due to the power of Ruby.
Plus, Rails has already got most of the stuff you’d need before starting to work on the project — we actually overcame this in PHP by developing our own mini-framework, even though it was far from being as powerful as Rails.

Thanks to Ruby on Rails we were able to change the way we worked as a team.
Instead of having three people working on the same project, we can how have one project for each one of us, and even though we help each other out when the need arises, we are able to have three different projects going at full-speed at the same time.
This, I believe, is the power of RoR: it allows you to do much more using much less resources.

Of course, it’s not just Rails. It could be Django. But I don’t think it’s as easy with any of the available PHP framework.
Sure, the framework itself plays a big part, but the big difference is made by the programming language, and I think we all agree PHP will never be able to compete with Ruby or Python. Those are the languages of the future, even more so than the ever so popular Java — which I can’t stand.

If you’re in the process of starting a new project and need to decide on a framework/programming language, give a try to Ruby on Rails or Django: you’ll be amazed by the difference they can actually make.

What framework are you using? do you feel like it’s working for you, or instead you’re working to make the framework work?

This post was written by Michele 2 years, 11 months ago on April 6th, 2007 late evening.