Ruby on Rails mid-life crisis on the horizon?

3rd November 2006, PHP, RoR, Technology, Trends

Obviously a bit early to talk of such stuff. RoR is most definately in its infancy and certainly here to stay. I’ve recently finished my first proper application using it and it is indeed a joy. While the project didn’t really get done any quicker, that’s down to learning RoR as I’m going, compared to knowing LAMP inside out. The sheer lack of lots of code in an RoR app is very impressive.

However, three things are happening which may give RoR some problems in maintaining its rate of adoption.

Firstly, Zend are developing a framework for PHP5. PHP5 gives LAMP developers a decent OOP language to work with certainly as good as Ruby when it comes to web applications with the added bonus of familiarity - we all know PHP.

Secondly, the reason PHP5 hasn’t really taken off in the real world is that reselling ISP’s all use Cpanel to administer accounts. CPanel never supported PHP5, only PHP4. This too is now changing with support now available, PHP5 will soon enjoy the same exposure as PHP4, and that’s the largest ISP base on the web.

Thirdly, Microsoft have finally embraced PHP by hooking up with Zend. This may be cycnical but its just another step for PHP which last year, with the advent of RoR was looking rather tired, jaded and simply out of date.

With OOP, over a large ISP base and a tidy framework to rival Rails to boot, suddenly things are looking a lot different. I like RoR and will continue to learn and develop with it, but if I’ve got a big project on and I can harness all those positives of RoR but use a language and can creatively solve problems with simply due to my familiarity with it, I’ll go the PHP route. And I don’t think I’ll be alone on this.