[mscottmcbee]

I don't do much web development, just a product once every year or so to play around with an idea. Always in PHP. A few months ago I was asked by a close friend to help them with a not-so-serious site. I decided that I'd use Rails, because, hey, I've heard nothing but good about it from HN and the like.

I was absolutely blown away by how much work it required to get started. That, and how painful it was to explain to a non technical person how to make visual changes.

I was told by a few friends I vented to that what I was doing was "too small" of a project, or "Rails is meant for web apps" which confused me because I assumed a site where you could upload images via a form and then browse and view them was right up its alley.

Edit: A lot of comments are talking about wrapping my head around the framework, MVC, ect. I had no problem building the initial application. My sore points are more about deployments and updating smaller things, like the image of a link. non-technical people don't often remember "oh, and if you want your change to show up, go to this folder, open 'restart.txt' and change it in some way. doesn't matter what, just add a space to the end".

[mikeryan]

You're making the mistake of conflating PHP the language with Rails the Framework.

I can do your app in Rails pretty damn quickly at this point (with one of my current skeleton frameworks I can add authentication administration and other nice features pretty much "for free" as well)

But tell me I have to do it CodeIgniter or Laravel and I'd be completely lost for days.

[orblivion]

The question then is, can you throw together a website in Ruby? Plus, have your non-technical folks be able to edit the templates?

[Arnor]

By the time your "non-technical folks" are editing templates, you have a problem regardless of your language/framework. If you only have enough knowledge to "add an image" stay out of my HTML!

[AdrianRossouw]

my life got so much easier when i stopped pretending that non-programmers should be able to work on the templating layer.

[dpritchett]

Ruby is not a hypertext preprocessor. You don't have a simple web server and a templating language in-scope unless you find them and set them up.

[saraid216]

Define "non-technical". Are we talking "I need teh WYSIWYGz" or "Cascading styles like a boss"?

[gngeal]

> You're making the mistake of conflating PHP the language with Rails the Framework.

I've heard someone call PHP "the C web framework". I thought it was fitting, and in addition, it seemed that even as a C web framework, it was a failure.

[theg2]

PHP may have some rather serious flaws but it is far from a failure and runs on a huge majority of the web.

[gngeal]

"but it is far from a failure"

CS-wise (and design-wise), it's very much a failure. It's a market success, though - just like VHS was, many years ago. ;-)

[cafard]

Agree that it has flaws, agree that it not a failure, but what do you mean "runs on a large majority of the web"?

[Jormundir]

PHP the C web framework? PHP a failure? Lol!

[gngeal]

"Lol!"

I think you're in the wrong place. Reddit is this way.

[mscottmcbee]

True, it's not exactly fair to compare getting started with a language and getting started with a framework, especially one as opinionated as Rails.

[pallandt]

If you were to start with a nearly blank slate in regards to your PHP knowledge + Laravel as a framework for example, throw in Composer, learning about Eloquent ORM and so on, you'd likely be facing the same reaction.

I'd like to also point out that if you want to do software dev by the book applying various sofware engineering principles and not just stringing something together that works, you're pretty much forced to use a framework. (either due to lack of time or lack of skills for building one the right way).

Sure, sometimes the most important thing is rolling something up quickly, but other times your project will be used by more than a handful of people, and/or you'll have expectations of producing monetizable value and anticipate regular maintenance/upgrades for which a different strategy is required.

[Shorel]

Deploying small changes with Laravel is very, very easy, and that's the parent post main complaint about RoR.

[thatthatis]

3rd generation full stack web frameworks (django, rails, etc) are optimized for 6 month happiness, not 6 hour happiness

They take longer to get set up, but as your project grows the incremental work to "change one small thing" stays relatively constant, whereas coded from scratch php or lightweight frameworks tend to have complexity of a change that is exponential with the number of lines of code.

It's a question whether the investment is worth it for what you're trying to do. Sometimes, quite reasonably, the answer is no.

I've got my django routine to the point where it takes me about 30-45 minutes to spin up a new stack that I'd be happy to code on for years -- to me that's a relatively minor investment for huge rewards.

[fleitz]

Yes, that's because PHP operates at thermodynamic equilibrium and creating order from those states requires the expenditure of energy.

Rails is great for creating a site with a form where people can upload images, it's a 20 to 30 minute project in rails, pretty much just take any rails blog tutorial and add paperclip. (Note, it's not a 20 minute project for anyone who doesn't already know rails)

Rails is not for non-technical people. Rails is like a great jig, if you're a master craftsman it's going to save you a lot of time, if you're not don't bother, just tweak things until they fit together. If you're someone who has spent the last 5 years building furniture by tweaking things then you will love a jig.

[bcoates]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_external_defibrillato... -- the AED is worse in every way than a properly trained professional with the right tools, except for one way: its there, it sort-of works, and you can't beat something with nothing.

Requiring a professional is a flaw, not a virtue. It's particularly problematic in our industry, where the end-user and most of the people involved in the production are not professional programmers.

[nthj]

> Requiring a professional is a flaw, not a virtue.

Your statement depends entirely on the context. I agree that requiring a professional to assemble my IKEA furniture would be a flaw. Requiring a professional to assemble my custom marble kitchen countertop totally makes sense and I'd hardly slam IKEA for not having such a package in Aisle 12.

[sanderjd]

Wow this is a really intriguing philosophical difference. I'm a big fan of specialization. I think it is the only way a complex society could possibly function. I'm glad that as an end-user of cars, airplanes, trains, medicine, MRIs, television, movies, wine, beer, liquor, the legal system, government services, etc. etc. etc. I don't need to be an expert in their design, development, and maintenance. It's great that because of its nature, software is more accessible than most things, but that doesn't mean it should all be made by non-professionals. There's plenty of room for both non-professional and professional tools, and neither approach is fundamentally flawed.

[dpritchett]

There's nothing wrong with professionals building tools for other professionals. PHP surely requires less activation energy for a tiny project or a new developer, but that doesn't mean Rails et al aren't providing useful options for full-timers.

[vlucas]

I spent most of my life in PHP, and now spend most of it in Ruby/Rails and mobile development. Believe me, people can make utter messes no matter the language. This is not as strong as an argument as you think it is. I've seen my fair share of terribly coded Rails apps as well as PHP ones.

[fleitz]

Yup, often PHP is the right tool for the job, however, in professional settings it is invariably the wrong tool for the job.

Just as you'd never want to use an AED at a hospital (unless every medical professional was unavailable)

[ArbitraryLimits]

> Requiring a professional is a flaw, not a virtue.

Don't you think that depends mostly on whether there are professionals available?

[scott_karana]

No. If a professional is available, better paths will be taken. If not, there is no requirement.

[tokenizer]

Funny, but not necessarily true. With PHP, I do as you say and spend, if I know the language, 1 hour max setting up a CRUD list/view/admin.

With Ruby, I have to spend, at least 3 months learning the concepts behind the Rails framework and what the article OP mentions just to get to that 20 to 30 minute mark.

If anything it's all meaningless, and what everyone should understand is that while the closer you are to the web server itself (CGI+PHP, Node.js, Classic ASP), you can quickly create any type of code, at the loss of organization and order.

In frameworks (criticism of Rails can also be attributed to Wordpress IMO) you have a much larger ramp up time learning the concepts and conventions, and once familiar, are able to LEVERAGE those patterns.

But don't bother me with PHP vs Ruby. I run SSI on nginx. It's not even in the same league as those two. BUT it's even easier to spin a basic 5 page website. All tools have their specialties.

[sanswork]

I think your first two lines are a bit unfair. In the first line you say it takes you an hour while mentioning in passing already knowing the language.

In the second you say it takes 3 months because you have to learn the framework. Honestly if it takes you 3 months to understand rails well enough to do a CRUD app there is no way you're learning PHP well enough to do the same CRUD app in less time.

[fleitz]

The problem is learning PHP actually makes you worse at PHP.

The only possible way to program PHP is to be pretty much ignorant of everything in which case PHP will actually do kinda what you wanted. If you learned PHP then either it's not actually doing what you think it's doing, or some config variable changed and would have done what you thought except it didn't, but don't worry just add some code to change that config variable for a while, and then change it back.

PHP is zen.

There is a story of a young, but earnest PHP student who approached his teacher, and asked the Master, "If I work very hard and diligently, how long will it take for me to learn PHP?"

The Master thought about this, then replied, "Ten years."

The student then said, "But what if I work very, very hard and really apply myself to learn fast. How long then?"

Replied the Master, "Well, twenty years."

"But, if I really, really work at it, how long then?" asked the student.

"Thirty years," replied the Master.

"But, I do not understand," said the disappointed student, "at each time that I say I will work harder, you say it will take me longer. Why do you say that?"

Replied the Master, "When you have one eye on the goal, you only have one eye on the path."

[pallandt]

I think the big problem with PHP is the fact that you can find so many tutorials online still not having caught up with current practices, not just in terms of language updates or security, but in terms of software engineering. Not knowing any better and how to distinguish between quality learning material, newcomers will happily put into practice what they've learned on good 'authority' to be correct. Same applies for many books on PHP. There's one particular very prolific and popular author, whose PHP books are always revelled, yet if you read them, he's not actually teaching at a standard a lot higher than what you can find other places. You end up having to spend more time having to re-learn stuff and trying to forget bad approaches...one of the downsides of it being a language with a longer history that Ruby+Rails.

[smokingkipper]

Hi, this is very interesting to me as I am currently picking up PHP.

Can you point me to some resources which don't fall into the trap you highlighted?

[tokenizer]

Thank you dearly for this. What's your opinion on SSI?

[fleitz]

I'm not personally a huge fan of SSI, however, it's simple and understandable, and things do what you think they do.

What I like about it is clean separation, a few command for common things, and if SSI doesn't directly support what you want you just hand it off to another program.

[Shorel]

With Laravel: php artisan generate:scaffold some_type --fields="..."

That's not one hour. That's one minute.

[danielweber]

Ruby is my favorite language but I had kept out of Rails for years besides hello-world stuff. The amount of layers upon layers upon layers makes one's head spin. And if something goes wrong, you better hope you are using the exact same toolchain as the audience on StackOverflow is using, because that's what they'll be expecting you to have as well.

[trekky1700]

I was in the same boat, I had spent years creating PHP websites and then was faced with the Rails framework. When you're first getting used to MVC, it seems very counter intuitive. I ended up using Symfony to get used to MVC while sticking with PHP, and now have switched to Rails and wouldn't dream of going back.

When you're first starting with it, especially moving from creating PHP files, it seems very counter intuitive and over complicated. But once you get used to the layout, you understand why it really is far superior for creating websites.

[joebeetee]

I know the author emphasizing a point, but the steps that he's described end with two vastly different results:

1 - A php script on a server with a script with some code on it.

vs

2 - A full featured MVC framework, complete with version control, database integration, easy deployment, which is easy for other developer to jump into, etc etc

How can these two options be equated?

[mscottmcbee]

A lot (a majority?) of websites aren't made by people that need those things. A lot of people just want to get their ideas up on a page so they can show their friends. The thing I walked away with from the article was that PHP is still active in part because it has such a low entry point for those people, where as Rails does not.

Like you said, they're very different entities, but a lot of people can't tell or don't care about the difference.

[AdrianRossouw]

i'm personally learning to love static html again. the longer i can get away without a users database the better.

[film42]

I don't know about you, but when I decide to do a project, I'll often use a new technology that I'll struggle with, because I want to learn and grow as a developer. Giving up because something is hard is a poor excuse. Period.

[mscottmcbee]

Who said anything about giving up?

[film42]

You're right, you didn't. But, would you use rails again for your next project? The tone of your comment sounds like you'd like nothing to do with it next time around.

I didn't mean for my comment to come off as snobby, I just hope you don't discard rails/ruby (or branching out from php) because you feel it's not the easiest to work with out of the box (even if only for non-technical people).

[mscottmcbee]

No, I'm not out right discrediting it, but given how little I do in web and how small most of my experiments are, I probably won't use it for a long time just because I don't need what it provides.

[vlucas]

It's funny too that upload functionality is mentioned here in your base requirements, because that alone is a whole bunch more steps when deploying to a PaaS like Heroku. You don't have a local filesystem, so you have to find and use gems like carrierwave, signup for Amazon S3, create a bucket, configure it in your Rails app, etc. etc.

[sanderjd]

> ...I assumed a site where you could upload images via a form and then browse and view them was right up its alley

Ah, your assumption was correct but incomplete. Doing that and a bunch more is right up its alley, but if you're doing only that, there are much easier ways.

[Edmond]

shameless plug but next time you want to do a web-app/site consider our product (crudzilla.com)...it is basically a web-dev-to-deployment solution in one package.

[Edmond]

down voted?...internet forums just get new names but the character remains the same:)

[Shorel]

Laravel seems a much better investment for you.