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PHP certainly has it's moments in the sun. It's simple and quick to get going to be a fairly straightforward basic web site, not application, but site. Maybe you just need to do some simple includes to reuse HTML elements. Or perhaps you have a form you wish to save to a database. All fairly simple to do with PHP.

The problem's with PHP lie in going beyond that simple point. The point where it's no longer a web site, but rather a web application. When developing a web application you need structure, you need separation of your business logic from your HTML. You need a framework that facilitates that structure. And, of course, you need to be able to build it fast!

Enter Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails, or just simply Rails, is built on the Ruby language and provides a highly dynamic, yet terse, web application development environment.

Ruby on Rails is a highly dynamic web application framework that focuses on enforcing a strict, opinionated, version of the Model, View, Controller pattern.

Since Rails is written in Ruby the developers of Rails were able to use the beauty of Ruby's meta-programming to hide all sorts of implementation and code from the end developer. While this might sound like a bad thing, it's not. In Ruby since a class is truly never 'closed' it can be re-opened and re-defined by the end developer. This makes Rails a very powerful framework.

PHP doesn't offer this level of 'dynamic' code creation. It also does not enforce a strict MVC paradigm. This causes code to become jumbled and messy. SQL statements are littered about with HTML and there is no central place to define your application and your business logic.

Learn more about this author, John Hume.
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