Gazley Posted August 14, 2012 Share Posted August 14, 2012 Hello there! I'm on day #2 of a Ruby/Ruby on Rails course. I've been sent on it by my employer who has decided to adopt Rails going forward. I quite like Ruby, but Rails, well I'm not sure about it at all. The whole experience has left me feeling very happy with PHP and amazed at what you can do with ProcessWire by comparison to some of the nonsense I've been working with in Rails. There are many really good MVC frameworks available in PHP so Rails's MVC has no particular advantage in 2012. PHP has some tremendous OOP capabilities in 5.3/5.4 so I don't see Ruby having any particular advantage over PHP either, unless of course, you are a Ruby developer who doesn't know PHP! So, no big deal but I thought I'd share this with you. Cheers! 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
teppo Posted August 14, 2012 Share Posted August 14, 2012 I've always been fascinated by Ruby and wanted to learn more of it. As a language it's super clean and contains many little "tricks" you can use to write really beautiful code. On the other hand, I've always been held back by the fact that even though Ruby might be pretty, it's not particularly powerful / efficient and definitely not nearly as well supported and widely adopted as PHP. When using Ruby to build web-based applications the only available (and viable) solution seems to be Rails. Someone correct me if I'm wrong -- other solutions do exist but generally speaking they don't seem mature enough to use outside small / personal projects. Meanwhile with PHP there are quite literally hundreds of viable platform choices. Anyway, widening your toolbox with things like Ruby/RoR sounds like a great idea, but I sure hope your employer doesn't force you to use RoR for projects it doesn't really fit just because it's "hip" ('cause that'd be a real shame ) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gazley Posted August 14, 2012 Author Share Posted August 14, 2012 Hi teppo I doubt it will get that far. In 2008, they sent me on a .NET WPF course and a .NET WCF course. I never used either of them at work since then! I'm establishing something of my own outside of my "day job", which is totally PHP based. I agree with you totally about the PHP ecosystem - bigger and better. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pete Posted August 14, 2012 Share Posted August 14, 2012 RoR was really big a few years back with a lot of hosting companies scrambling to support it on their servers - presumably to cash in on the craze. I've just not seen much done with it though. If someone asks you to code in it and you're trying to get back to the safety and comfort of PHP, it's always handy to be able to say things like "Google and Facebook both use PHP and look what they can do". Obviously it you're talking to a client who's part of a large organisation, half their staff may be on Facebook most of the time so probably best not to mention that one and stick with Google as the example 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Martijn Geerts Posted August 14, 2012 Share Posted August 14, 2012 @ Pete.... lol A nice blockpost from: Liip.ch about why they stick to PHP. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SiNNuT Posted August 14, 2012 Share Posted August 14, 2012 I'm not sure it's correct to compare RoR to ProcessWire. You would rather use RoR to build something like PW in Ruby i guess, for example http://www.locomotivecms.com/ I think it would be better to compare it to Zend Framework, Symfony or even Django (Python) 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gazley Posted August 14, 2012 Author Share Posted August 14, 2012 SiNNut - you are quite right, it's a totally bogus "Apple and Oranges" comparison. I guess the real comparison is down to this; I've heard about how magical RoR is, I've been using it on the course and you know what - I'm totally underwhelmed, despite the all the hype and all of the resource and community around its development over the past 6-8 years or so. By accident, I stumbled on ProcessWire that has been, from what I understand, largely the results of one person combined with the help of an enthusiastic, yet relatively small community by comparison to that belonging to RoR. When I started to look at PW, I was amazed at how well thought out it is, how well architected it is, how easy to use it is, and how powerful it is. I immediately got that "giddy" feeling when you know you've stumbled onto something amazing. I just didn't get that buzz or excitement about RoR despite having heard for years about how good it is and how it's better since V3. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SiNNuT Posted August 14, 2012 Share Posted August 14, 2012 I understand what you are saying. I haven't used anything outside of PHP but i have used a few other cms/f products and none of them i really liked. Until i found PW. In the end it's all about using the right tool for the job, but in my experience PW is the right tool for a whole lot of jobs. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gazley Posted August 16, 2012 Author Share Posted August 16, 2012 The course finished and my feeling around RoR were pretty much the same as I last mentioned. However, one thing I really did like about RoR was a new feature in 3.2+ (I think) called "asset pipeline" that handles the processing and bundling of CSS, JS and other assets. What was cool about it was that I had Coffeescript files and SASS files open in the editor and worked directly against them. When I refreshed the browser page, RoR detected that the sources files had changed, ran the various compilers against them, bundled the output and refreshed the cache, with the page immediately updated. I've never used CoffeeScript before, I use JS as-is, but it really reduced the amount of code. I would definitely use SASS more if the compilation steps were that easy. You could just edit the SASS files just like editing a vanilla .css file and the "asset pipeline" handled the rest. Very cool indeed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SiNNuT Posted August 16, 2012 Share Posted August 16, 2012 It's neat that the framework can take care of that stuff, but there's nothing stopping you from using sass, less, stylus, coffeescript and whatnot in your projects today, be it with PW projects or other. If you are on Mac you can check out CodeKit. I'm on Windows myself so i haven't used it but i've heard good things. Also, there are many other tools available on all platforms that can take care of compilation, concatenation, minification etc. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gazley Posted August 16, 2012 Author Share Posted August 16, 2012 The nice thing about the asset pipeline is that it's independent of the editor. I am on a Mac but I'm using Snow Leopard. Codekit only runs on Lion+ - so, for me that's out of the window. You could be using Vi as your editor and still get the benefits of the compilation outside of the editor or other tools. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Martijn Geerts Posted August 16, 2012 Share Posted August 16, 2012 Gazley, you thought about http://livereload.com/ as alternative? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gazley Posted August 16, 2012 Author Share Posted August 16, 2012 Hey Martijn - that looks cool! Will check it out Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
onjegolders Posted March 25, 2014 Share Posted March 25, 2014 Just picking this up as I've been brushing up on a bit of Ruby and I still can't quite get my head around just how hard it is to get up and running in it. Setting up a decent local environment with Ruby or ROR just puts me off every time. Too many things to figure out/configure. Now I'm sure if I had the time and no alternative (which I do with PHP) I'd figure it out but as it stands it's just too much to put me off. Processwire is clearly a better tool for most of us when it comes to building websites but I've always been attracted by the syntax of Ruby. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
clsource Posted March 30, 2014 Share Posted March 30, 2014 I think Rails is usefull for certain situations like you need a ecommerce that easily integrates with mobile. http://spreecommerce.com/ I have not find a way better software for ecommerce than that one. Sure it can be done in Processswire, but why reinvent the wheel? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Macrura Posted March 30, 2014 Share Posted March 30, 2014 I think Rails is usefull for certain situations like you need a ecommerce that easily integrates with mobile. http://spreecommerce.com/ I have not find a way better software for ecommerce than that one. Sure it can be done in Processswire, but why reinvent the wheel? wow spree looks cool; how would you compare it to a solution with processwire+foxycart? FC 2.0 is coming in a few days. I've been able to successfully setup several sites with PW+FC and the clients really like working with PW since it has such amazing admin customization; also PW makes it easy to model the business logic and let FC handle the checkout. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
clsource Posted March 31, 2014 Share Posted March 31, 2014 wow spree looks cool; how would you compare it to a solution with processwire+foxycart? FC 2.0 is coming in a few days. I've been able to successfully setup several sites with PW+FC and the clients really like working with PW since it has such amazing admin customization; also PW makes it easy to model the business logic and let FC handle the checkout. FoxyCart seems pretty neat!. But the main diference with Spree is that you need to program the logic on products and stuff, and foxy takes the shopping cart side. So if you need an all in one solution use Spree. maybe if you need something more hand made you could use Foxy + Processwire Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xweb Posted April 23, 2014 Share Posted April 23, 2014 I can't speek for Spree but Prestashop is awsome. Open-source build in PHP and with lots of features, I've used it in the past and did not regret. Give it a try. AM Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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