From PHP to Ruby
A journey on Rails
by
Kapil Mohan
Uzanto Consulting

“I am a PHP guy”

“I am a PHP guy”
Well, “many” of us are

“I am a PHP guy”
Well, “many” of us are
Some are Java guys, eh

“Ruby on Rails is hot!”

Should I develop my next webapp in Ruby on Rails?
Is it really really worth it?
Should I abandon PHP forever?
Can I pickup Ruby and Rails easily?
Do RoR applications scale?
Is Ruby slower than PHP?
Is there enough community support for Rails?

What's broken in a Rails-less world?

What's broken in a Rails-less world?
Pretty much everything.

Website != Webapp
Website is a collection of webpages. Users browse thru webpages.
Webapp is a collection of 'tasks'. Users perform certain tasks.
Precisely, webapp is where users do some actions and receive
some response in order to do certain tasks.

Website == Webapp

404: Page not found

We need a
mature
easy to learn and use
efficient
well documented
web programming language and framework
And we need controllers, actions and views. Models may come as well.

Java
Struts
Beans
...
Its a complex world. Its ugly as well.

Ruby is easy to pick-up
Everything is an object
Syntactical differences from PHP
Ruby is elegant and expressive
Ruby is well documented

Ruby makes it easy to write a Domain Specific Language

“The Rails Way”

MVC

Convention over Configuration

CRUD

DRY

Ruby on Rails
Sometimes magical
Routing – breaks the page metaphor
Web2.0 ready
Gems
Cheap
Proven stack
Multiple database support
Backed by community

Does Rails scale?

Is Ruby slow? Yes.

Rails makes you 'think harder'

Questions?