What are your thoughts on Ruby?

goods and bads please.

Ruby is great, but not yet as supported by hosts as PHP is. I've just started using it and the RAILS framework and it has made rapid application development easy for me.

I stick to php. I don't know Ruby though but I don't think it is necessary to learn it. If I want to work faster with php I might go with one of the php frameworks.

Take a look at the programmer's hierarchy, that makes it pretty clear

Ruby on Rails is great, Ruby is great, the only thing I found problematic is IDE support. Refactoring and other support from the IDE, as you can get in Java, is worth at least 30% development time, and more in larger projects. Eclipse support for Ruby is under development though, things should improve. I have not used the latest Dynamic Languages Toolkit (DLTK) but the demo I saw was mighty impressive.

But if you come from Java development in Eclipse or IntelliJ or from Visual Studio and suddenly you have to use a bog standard text editor to write code, it's kind of shocking. Oh, so that's how people did it in the stone ages of computing. Horrible.

thanks guys, It sounds like Ill stick with a PHP site for now then.

How the guy described the system seemed to be very easy way of building a site. How he described the way you just insert code to make major changes, sounded ideal.. Im not a techy, so appreciate your thoughts.

cheers

Go with PHP, there are tons of tutorials with examples out there.

The idea is that you'll have only one page for your whole website, say index.php.

This page pulls various files together in various combinations to make it look like your site has a gazillion of pages.

Basically, say you have one file that has your top banner and links, for example. You change that single file and voila your whole website is updated because that file shows on top of every page.

To differentiate between various pages you'll have parameters after "?", for example after signing out of your site people would go to "index.php?page=home&message=goodbye", and it will tell index.php to include file that is refered to as "home" and also include a message from a file referred to as "goodbye".

The principle is the same for any server-script language - Pearl, ASP, PHP, ruby, whatever.

Big advantage of PHP is there are tons of people around that know it and practically every web hosting company provides it. So if you need work done to upgrade or extend your site later its easy to find someone and you can put your site nearly anywhere.

Ruby is nowhere near as ubiquitous.

Take a look at the programmer's hierarchy, that makes it pretty clear

Now fancy finding a treat like that on TV... The programmers hierarchy.......ouch ouch ouch scorchin....

But i dont see the 'video programmer' listed

I would recommend Ruby and RoR to any serious programmer. The database wrapping in particular is exquisite.

Ruby on Rails is very easy, but it's also very object oriented and highly dynamic, so it's somewhat clever as well.

The selling point would be: If you do your site in PHP, you can easily find a bunch of people to maintain it later. If you use RoR, you won't need a bunch of people to maintain it later. You can either do it yourself or have one person do it.

If I did a project, I would not consider PHP - it's tailored for web stuff, but it's also a huge "quick" hack. Managing large scale applications quickly gets out of hand, and the things that seemed quick and convenient instead become a source of constant errors.

I would either do it in Java because of its maintainability, or in Ruby because of its elegance.

Ruby on Rails allows you to get a demo app working extremely quickly. You basically take a template, define your database, and you have a web app already with hardly any code written. In 10 minutes, as they say. You can then take the demo and use it as basis for the real application by tweaking it to your needs.

The main caveat I see with this is that you will need to get into a Ruby mindset. Rails is so simple initially, but there is a lot of subtlety behind it, and I am afraid that in order to create a maintainable stable large scale app, you will have to eventually learn all that subtlety.

Java is pretty much the opposite of Rails - you need to hand-code even basic things (though there are many free frameworks out there that take care of, say, db wrapping). You end up writing a lot of code. It's not elegant. But it's very maintainable as everything is in its place, and that is enforced by the language. You need more discipline in RoR to do the same, and even more in PHP.