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There is a very rabid fan-base that spends it's time blowing the trumpet of PHP as the best answer for any task or CGI program of any sort. However, while PHP is very useful for simple tasks, pages, and applications, it is far from suitable for much of anything beyond this, and as an application framework, either personal or business, it must acquiesce to something more suitable.

PHP was originally created for the maintenance of a single programmer's homepage, and it works great for what it was originally intended to do. However, PHP is a very VERY poor choice for long-term business applications, or even moderately large short term ones.

PHP's basic approach of intermingling HTML and code may seem like a good idea at first, but it violates and confuses the logical distinction between page presentation, content, and program logic. PHP's development has no inherent design philosophy, or even a design strategy, and it's repertoire of functions and features was built entirely ad hoc, making it bloated and full of re-implementations.

By it's very nature, PHP has no central place to put program logic, and because of this it's code and logic is scattered throughout pages of text. This means it is practically impossible to make changes or improvements to large programs, and this makes it a nightmare to maintain such in the long term. Worse, this also means programs made it PHP do not, and CANNOT, remotely resemble the "Model, View, and Controller" (MVC) paradigm that is in widespread use in business applications.

In contrast, Ruby on Rails is an application framework that is entirely based on the MVC Structure that PHP lacks. This strict pattern leads to cleaner code, which is easier to maintain than the jumbles of spaghetti code created by PHP. Rail's class structure is heavily extendible with it's open classes, a feature to which PHP has nothing remotely similar. Merely because of these two points alone, Ruby on Rails makes a better framework for web applications.

Learn more about this author, Kristopher Chambers.
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