Ruby vs. PHP
Whenever you’re starting out on a new project there’s always a question of what kind of development environment you want to go with. In the case of Only Human, I was pretty much settled on Rails but came in contact with someone who made me question my decision, in a good way.
We were in search for just the right developer to bring our project to light and I came across Man Hoang from Computer Love (a social network for designers). He brought up some interesting points about choosing PHP over RUBY, and we pretty much went back and forth about the pros and cons to each. His primary argument was the fact that Ruby on Rails in general is a lot of hype and that it doesn’t scale or perform as well as a PHP solution. After doing a lot of research, it seemed that a lot of developers online felt the same way.
Then I got a chance to talk to one of the Rails guys over at Engine Yard, Ezra, who pointed out why I should choose a Rails solution over PHP. If you think about the costs of development compared to the cost of additional hardware needed to compensate for the “supposed” performance loss, you come out on top. A Rails environment provides the developers a way to develop and iterate much faster than a php solution, and with the falling prices of hardware and hosting solutions, the savings in development time and effort in the end came out in our favor.
Whole New Game
With engineyard’s hosting setup, performance and scaling is a whole new ball game because they are well versed in what it takes to make a big app scale to demand. So all in all, I was happy that Man brought up his arguments for PHP. It really made me go back and think about the real reasons I wanted to use Rails, and cut through all the hype and make a sound decision.