Debating web development toolsets

[Aaron Vegh]

Hi Kareem,

> I've looked into Ruby on Rails, and I have to admit the concepts of "Agile
> Development" sound sweet, but is it too good to be true?

I've taken some time to learn Rails, and have found it enforces a lot
of great coding practices, such as MVC. The limitations are that it
makes a lot of things easy, but the functionality that you want to
integrate becomes very hard.

> PHP: The defacto web standard?  It seems to be supported everywhere, scales
> well, and has lots of libraries, but can be difficult to maintain and get up
> to speed on.

I also think you'll find there are more PHP developers than any other
kind out there. It has broad support on any platform, has a very large
community behind it. From our previous discussion I can see that many
people think it's insecure, but again, with good coding practices you
can alleviate that point. I don't honestly think that it's hard to get
up to speed on.


> Ruby On Rails: If you believe the marketing hype, it'll do everything
> including walk the dog three times a day with one line of code.  Is this yet
> another web fad, or is RoR something worth pursuing?

I definitely think it's worth pursuing. If I were starting out today
I'd probably be neck deep into Rails. It has a large community, and
there's no question that it's a legitimate environment. Rails isn't
going anywhere. Not to mention that learning Ruby will give you
leverage in other parts of your computing life, as it's a full-on
object oriented language.

> Java:

Bah.

> ASP.NET:

Double-bah! You can't seriously expect a good answer on this list. ;-)

> Python:

Not familiar with this, but Python isn't exactly known for its
suitability for web app development.


> Perl:

There are a number of rabid old school fans of Perl, but it's been
supplanted by PHP.

To my mind, your decision is really between PHP and Rails. You'll be
able to build fine applications with either one: you just need to
stick your toe in the water and get a feeling for which community is
right for you.

Best of luck!
Aaron.

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Aaron Vegh, Principal
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