[mindstab]

um no?

PHP "has a relatively small community, with the majority of people working under the radar and on their own?" ?

Where is he getting these stats? relative to what? For instance

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

Says PHP the language is more popular than Ruby the language (let alone the subset of Ruby programmers who use Rails). I don't get where that perceived smallness comes from. In all my experience and every way I've seen the PHP community is vastly larger than the Ruby community. Also comparing a language to a Framework seems... weird. It might make more sense to compare Rails to Drupal at least, which again, in the enterprise world, I have seen waaay more Drupal installs than Rails ones. There are a few high profile Rails sites but it quickly seems to drop off into hobby and startup. Meanwhile Drupal is just everywhere. It's surprising.

Also, accusing the PHP community of "writing below par software while charging their clients for it?" is hilarious coming from the Rails camp. Generally lowering the bar for entrance while making it easier for good devs to get good work done faster also allows more "bad" devs to enter as well. Anyone remember earlier this year that core Rails bug that allowed people to overwrite almost all data that most big Rails sites were affected by (including github)

https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/5228

I cannot understand where this viewpoint is coming from, it seems hilarious (and at best, the criticisms seem like the pot calling the kettle black).

[bpatrianakos]

I blame the bubble. HN has a bubble, the Ruby community has its bubble, and so does the Rails community. Bubbles intersect but overall I blame the bubble(s).

[l0gicpath]

Php is a scripting language specifically designed for web development. Hence, not fit to be in a head to head comparison with a general purpose programming language.

Thus the comparison is held at that level (web), comparing php with a web framework. If that wouldn't make any sense, then it does make sense to compare php with C++ or Java (which it doesn't). After all, you can write a website in C++.

Putting that aside, your viewpoint is hilarious as well. I find it amusing how you call the issue you linked at, a core rails bug when your knowledge of rails doesn't qualify for such a statement.

It wasn't a bug. If you are a rails developer, have indeed read the issue and replies or at least read the title well enough, you would have concluded that it was a bad coding practice.

The security measure to prevent such mass attribute assignment "was" present for developer's to utilize. It's a single line of code, but some lazy asses wanted that auto-generated/forced/opt-out instead of opt-in.

It's a good practice, an advised practice, a recommended practice to write that single line of code. The fact that a mass majority of rails developers didn't write it, or ignored this warning doesn't mean it's a "core rails bug".

No, the ruby/rails community is not as large as Php.

Yes, the php community has an awkward tendency to write "below" the par software while charging for it.

Any experienced php developer will confirm this sad fact and will probably blame the language for it

(Php "is" flawed on so many levels: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...)

[mattyfo]

Sort of a tangent here but I've been trying to decide if our organization needs to move away from using Drupal for custom application development. You see to have some experience, what are your thoughts on it for highly customized web applications?

[Jgrubb]

Personally, I've been doing Drupal for a few years now and found the knowledge and skills to be a lot harder-won than the knowledge and skills that I've picked up with Rails in the last few months. The knowledge and skills that I've picked up working with Drupal (HTTP, Databases, etc) more or less translate into general app development, so that surely has something to do with it.

I said this to my wife this morning - "you know what, building stuff in Rails just feels like it accesses my creative brain more than anything I've done before." Having been exposed to some of what Acquia is doing with their cloud hosting stuff I can say with a fair amount of certainty that almost anything under the sun can be accomplished with Drupal, but that's (the creative bit) probably why I'm on a Rails kick lately. It's just more fun (to me). The overhead does feel lower, too.

Sorry if that didn't lend any insight to your actual question.

[mindstab]

eh, I've only lightly dabbled in Rails and Django, nothing serious, where as for work I use a lot of Drupal, so I don't have the most balanced or informed view.

Drupal is kind of a framework and a CMS in one, it's somewhat unique. It also seems that in PHP land a lot of the frameworks are converging on a standard, it seems like Symphony 2 will be used as a base for other projects (like Drupal 8). The point is, Druapl gives you a lot more out of the gate than any other framework in PHP or any other language.

The "con" would be that you have to work in PHP and work with their relatively straightforward imperative API instead of cooler OO APIs with ORM (Though Drupal 7's revamped DB API offers some new interesting options). If those barely register as cons with you then the only reason to change and abandon already built infrastructure would be something those languages have PHP/Druapl doesn't like some binding for some cool feature.

Ah, one other con for Drupal, it does have a lot of over head and can at times be slow. But then again, easily if not more so can Rails have overhead and be slow. They like to brag about their > 1000 lines of pluralization code, others cringe. Smaller frameworks might be faster. Django possibly, but I really have no idea.

So it comes down to what you are doing and the requirements. I want to learn them all so I can better evaluate them all and in the future more knowledgeably pick the best tool for each new job

[mtts]

You always need to move away from using Drupal for "highly customized web applications". Drupal is a CMS with something vaguely resembling a framework bolted on.

[troels]

I've used Rails and I've used Drupal for custom applications (not just out-of-the-box cms sites). It would be a cold day in hell, where I picked Drupal over Rails.

[ehutch79]

1) userbase is not a community, usergroups and such are.

2) the sub-par php code thing? go post on place like craig's list, where the uninformed who need developers might post things, and see what kind of developers respond. go look at wordpress plugins. go look at tutorials and examples on blogs. while yes, there are certainly well qualified php programmers, you're going to see a lot of horrifying code.

[mindstab]

... and all the rails code of the world is better? How has the rails community gotten this "my shit don't smell" attitude? Like I said, the barrier to entry for ails is even lower, it stands to reason that there would be even more horrifying Rails code out there. Every language and framework is going to have horrifying code, I don't understand how you can ignore the Rails communities code while singling out PHPs

[ehutch79]

eh, i honestly always thought the rails community had a pretentious streak running through. can't defend them too much. same goes for python, and many other communities too.

there's a lot going on there. however i think most of what the post is talking about is how as a community grows it's cohesiveness wanes.