No.
Giving my talk: “The Underpants Gnomes Strategy Guide: An e-cards case study” at ZendCon 2006
[A real pissing contest after the jump.]
The problem is that Jeremy Privett is following the PHP internals mailing list. If he bothered to look at the archives he’d know this crap is as old as time and just as publicized back then as now. There were just as many egos then as now. Heck, some of the egos are the same.
See the forest from the trees.
Do we honestly think anyone cares what people say on php internals?
Cute girl: “What do you do?”
Me: “I’m a PHP Software Architect.”
Cute girl: “What’s PHP? It sounds like a drug.”
Me: “No, it stands for PHP Hyper… nevermind. It’s a web language.”
Cute girl: *blank stare*
Me: “It’s the thing that powers more websites than any other language.”
Cute girl: *blank stare*
Me: “Umm, it powers Yahoo!”
Cute girl: “Oh!”
*dead silence*
Cute girl: “Hey, does it ‘power’ MySpace?”
Me: “No, they use dotNet.”
Cute girl: *turns the other way and starts to talk to the other guy*
It’d be very shortsighted to judge the health of PHP from the internals mailing list. (Corollary: Don’t try to pick up a girl using PHP, reality <> fantasy.)
PHP should be more like Ruby (on Rails)
“As much as I hate to say this … You guys really need to take some advice from Ruby Devs.”
—Jeremy Privett on PHP internals developers
Yes, and maybe if we work really hard at promoting ourselves we can get a developer to create a site using PHP that will reach #700 on the internet that fails so often that they’ve ruined the cuteness of cats.
Oh Rasmus, why do you engage in this “virtual crap-flinging”? Can’t you lead by example like David Heinemeier Hansson? That guy is the height of maturity and an expert scalability guy.
The PHP Sky is Falling! If PHP doesn’t get it’s act together Rails will unleash their dogs of fury.
Who let the dogs out?
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
—Mahatma Ghandi
OSCON 2005:
“Unless you’re Ruby.”
—Danny O’Brien, “On Evil”
OSCON 2006 (Year of the Dog):
Out with the dog
This quote got me into a lot of trouble:
“Ruby is really good at what it does. The problem is, for what Ruby does really well, I can download WordPress. [Ruby is] really good at building those apps that have already been built before. PHP is good at finding out what the next WordPress is.”
—Terry Chay, “Interview with Terry Chay”, Pro-PHP Podcast
I was born in the Year of the Pig and it’s my year now. Out with the dog!
Here is one for you:
- People like me are smart and have to run extremely large scalable internet infrastructures.
- People like me have used Rails.
- People like me don’t use Rails to build extremely large scalable internet infrastructures
To the Rails developers that’s an inconsistent triad. They’ll say I’m actually dumb and I don’t “get” Rails. To me, it’s completely consistent (They’re right about me being dumb, but that’s what makes me smart):
And I’m going to tell it like it is:
Let’s have a little reality check. Yahoo! is #1 on the internet. Heck, even Tagged does way better than than #726 (#92 today, after a series of really bad site outages). And Tagged isn’t even close to the largest website written in PHP in its space (That belongs to #18, Facebook):
I remember before Yahoo! adopted PHP, every small site that I could find that used PHP I was shouting from the mountaintops—“NASCAR uses PHP!”
Twitter may be at 700, but it’s a great product and it’s probably the largest Rails installation on the internet. Before that it was…what was it? Oh yeah!
And how about that David Heinemeier Hansson guy? What a great guy huh?
If I were David Heinemeier Hansson, I’d be fellating Alex Payne right now for proving that Rails can scale, as long as you rip out all the stuff that makes Rails attractive in the first place. (Think of it this way: How many twitter clones are there? What was the barrier to entry? How dependent was twitter on hype? If they didn’t use Rails would have the lag time for using PHP or some other language hurt? Now isn’t that something to be proud of?)
But what does this so-called master of the PR do? Oh yeah.
Remind me, what is DHH doing lecturing al3x about scalability?
WWRD? (What would Rasmus do?) I’ll tell you what he wouldn’t do. He wouldn’t say that his largest installation can’t scale because they don’t know PHP. He wouldn’t write a book bragging a company that has never broken into the top 1000 can purport to tell you about success.
He also wouldn’t engage in this mudslinging or “pissing contest.”
But that’s why I’m around.
If Zend puts your photo on a deck of cards, you’ve either arrived in the PHP world or are a terrorist.
I’m a PHP terrorist.
Go look me up in the archives. I’m not even the one doing the pissing there. But I piss on whom I please, and say what I want, and Rasmus has to just shake his head and take it. (Hence the irony in WWRD?—get it now?)
Marking my territory by pissing on the Rails
Alex Payne isn’t saying Rails is crap; I’m not saying Rails is crap. We’re not even saying Rails can’t scale or Ruby can’t do the web.
I can’t speak for Alex, but what I’m saying is look at the top 100 websites on the internet: about 40% of them are written in PHP and 0% of them are written in Rails. (Yes, I can (and am) using this statistic to grind you Ruby fuckers into the dust.) But to me, there is an alternate conclusion, since 60% of sites out there don’t use PHP:
“The web problem ain’t that hard.”
PHP may be the best web language out there. But it certainly isn’t the only one. It’s one approach, one that stresses configuration over convention, stupidity over smarts, practicality over elegance: it’s one ugly mother f—er that gets shit done.
I didn’t choose Ruby on Rails because I hate it (I don’t, it’s a very clever approach). I didn’t choose it because Convention over Configuration is untested and unproven in the marketplace. I didn’t choose it because I didn’t want to be the guy saying “I’m not going to hire you because you don’t ‘get’ it.” I’m not going to get the Ruby religion because when it comes to languages, I’m an atheist. I didn’t want to be the guinea pig when Rails hit a ranking of 5000, or 1500, or 700, or 500, or 300, or 100, or 40, or 15, or 1 (Yahoo! and PHP, undefeated).
But al3x did (at least to 700 anyway). And that’s why Ruby on Rails world should stop having their own circle jerk and honestly address the real problems: Less “Oh, we just need to implement connection pooling or Query Cache. And, by the way, didn’t DHH just put that kid al3x in his place, that totally r0x3rd.” and more “How can we give scalable sites alternatives to Active Record? And, by the way, maybe those people who build really large websites daily have something to teach us.”
You want me to stop laughing? Then stop picking on your own and start proving me wrong!
Me, fully quoted
August 2006 (Year of the dog):
There are those answers out there and in many ways, since they’re web companies, PHP is an easy way to build those answers. Because there are things like Ruby out there. And Ruby on Rails is extremely good at doing real simple things like building a recipe database—you can do that in six lines of Ruby.
But the thing is [Rails] is a framework so you eat the entire framework when you do that. PHP has no framework. You can choose to use a framework but it has no framework. So look at the problem. You don’t start with anything [and that] hurts you initially, but it really helps down the road because a lot of these answers are not simply: let’s build an e-store and somehow magically make money. The answers you have to construct are Web 2.0-style answers, they’re not simply reducible to selling dogfood on the web—they’re more complex answers than that. So you require a language that can navigate that complexity without forcing you to eat that framework that boxes you in and colors the lines for you to build that web database…
I know it sounds like I’m ragging on Rails, but I’m just trying to emphasize the strength of PHP. I like to say that complicated systems must always have simplistic behavior because they’re too complicated for people to understand. It is complex systems built on simple ideas that can have complex behavior. And PHP, while it doesn’t have the advantages of quick-start that Rails gives you, does have advantages in its flexibility, its pragmatism, its stupidity (if you will) that allow you to build those complex systems by stringing together a bunch of simple ideas.
If there is one thing I want the listeners to take home it’s that eCards or whatever, this is just one perspective of how I built one thing. But there is a general answer there—like Louis Pasteur saying, “Chance favors the prepared mind”—there is an opportunity in the listener’s institutions where PHP is a very powerful tool, very easy to understand, waiting for the listeners to use to build these amazing complex systems by stringing these simple things that PHP gives us.
…
I’m really low on my scatological count here…I’m sorry I didn’t crack enough jokes or use enough [cuss words], but I’m sure people will forgive me. They can just attend one of my talks and get their cuss quota for the year. And if not, coding these web apps themselves involves a lot of swearing—a lot of blood, sweat and swear.
…
Ruby is really good at what it does. The problem is that for what Ruby [on Rails] does really well, I can download Matt Mullenweig’s WordPress… It is really good at building those apps that have been solved before. PHP is good at finding out what the next WordPress is, what the next CMS is, or wiki is.
It is a very configurable, flexible language for answering those questions and it doesn’t strap you in and say, “PHP. The only way to do things.” It can’t do jack without Apache, without MySQL or another database like Oracle, or Java or C or accessing the command line to get shit done. Because of that, it’s never going to tell you that you have to do it “the PHP way” whatever the hell that means as opposed to do it the way you want to because you happen to have this nice tool whether it is imagemagick or whatever.
And that is where PHP is strong.
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@web programmer: Thanks. You’ve added a lot to the discussion.
@Gabrielle: What a nice way of politely pointing out the soft gender bigotry in my post.
Pray you never meet me, though. You won’t get a chance to walk away because I can’t shut up! (You probably won’t leave learning anything except that I’m a pretty hilarious PHP developer.)
If you could share an experience where you got the same blank stare when geeking out with some guy, then that would be both fitting and proper. Most of the blank stares I give a pretty girl are… well…
@Bill Sanders: Reading your comment is like reading a shorter me.
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Alex Williams’s How not to drink the Ruby coloured cool-aid and When techno-weenies make lame technology choices
Ian adds his views about PHP, Rails, and ISVs.
Just as a minor historical nit to pick: Movable Type was not a clone of Radio Userland, unless you’re making a claim about Userland inventing the concept of the weblog. (Dave Winer may think so, but I remain slightly dubious.) Radio was implemented in a very different way from, well, nearly everything that came after it: it ran entirely on your PC and pushed static files out to your web site. And, as an even less relevant footnote, Radio was written in Userland’s proprietary “Frontier” scripting language. (Delphi was an interesting guess, though!)
As to, oh, the actual topic of the post, I’ve never really grokked language/framework partisanship beyond “this is what makes sense to me.” I make a living doing PHP programming (currently using the Cake framework, no less), but really like what I’ve seen of Rails. DHH’s “Rails will take over the world and you’re idiots if you don’t see it” histrionics can be exasperating, but the “Rails is all hype and you’re idiots if you don’t see it” responses tend to be just as histrionic and ill-informed.
Rails is awfully young, has a lot of work to do (just like other platforms that came before it did), and anyone making predictions about massive success or massive failure at this point is blowing smoke. It’s gotten more attention faster than any other framework, and I think that’s a large part of what’s pissing people off about it: it’s just not fair that something so new, untested, and with a lot of glaringly obvious growing pains ahead of it has gotten so many people so excited so quickly!
You are talking too much about what have been done with PHP. You forget since when PHP was out and when Rails got out, and how much attention it got… and continue to get (RoR)
I started coding PHP since 1999 and I switched to Rails for few month. I have my personally reasons for that, and I think everyone else have too. So this discussion about what has been build with what, cannot go anywhere.
Most people switch from PHP to Rails, don’t forget that – as I see the topics on Ruby Forum
I can talk about WTF I want because it’s my blog and I blog about PHP, not Rails. Rails is just my gimp for the purposes of this article.
Indeed, some people switched from PHP to Rails because… they failed at PHP. Surprisingly PHP’s powering a significant percentage of top websites show that a lot of other programmers didn’t seem to have that problem.
I’d harsh on you more, but I didn’t understand half of what you wrote.
@Watts: I think we agree on both extremes. Though personally, I’m not pissed off, I’m amused.
Ruby hitched their cart to the Web 2.0 bandwagon and then claimed that they were the ones pulling it.
Smart.
tychay, you should relax..
It’s your blog and you can talk about you want, but you are not getting anywhere.
I wouldn’t say “some people switched from php to rails”, I would say “many people switched from to rails”.
as I wrote earlier everyone have their own reasons why they switched, so no need to talk about PHP advantage or whatever.
PHP is the most active open source language project nowaday. It is sure to blow Python, Ruby away. http://www.ohloh.net/languages;compare?measure=commits&percent=&l0=php&l1=python&l2=ruby&l3=erlang&l0_0=-1&commit=Update
Terry,
PHP has matured, Rails is maturing…. one day, Rails will be like PHP. You may see PHP dominating now but can you say that it will be the case 2 years from now.
Scaling is not language dependent.. its art…. its web architecture. Give that someone PHP, that doesn’t necessarily mean he can build some thing that scales well…. same thing, Rails can also be scaled well if the craftsman is well-skilled. As to why Twitter had problem scaling, ask Dr Nic… He has the answer… Alex doesn’t..
Cheers.
So terry .. this is all in the spirit of getting more amazon associates fee for selling more Rails books through your Amazon ads below right…. lol ….
@Khang Toh:
I have no doubt that Ruby will mature. I think the pace is highly exaggerated and that as a community their ego is closing themselves off to good ideas from outside Ruby.
Ruby on Rails will never be like PHP. That’s like saying J2EE will be like PHP.
A lot of Ruby developers come from the Java world. They don’t realize that it isn’t the language that failed them, it was their attitude that did.
Scaling IS language dependent in the sense that some languages attract developers who add features that don’t scale well. That is a difference between Ruby and PHP. Rails needs a “skilled craftsman” willing to rip out and redo everything Rails put into Ruby to keep an uptime of a day. PHP just needs a person just smart enough to find out the scalability solutions that have already been discovered, implemented, and banked on to keep an uptime of years excluding code pushes.
Does PHP give you 5 9’s? Nope. Are there other languages that can be just as good or better for some web problems? Yes.
Does PHP have best practices that ensure scalability to the largest sites on the internet? Yes. Does Ruby? Nope.
Reality check: all sites of decent sizes build on social networking and virality have hit the issue of database federation affecting scalability. With few exceptions they’ve all dealt with it and moved on to other scalability issues. The fact that Twitter still hasn’t solved this is, in 2007, laughable. If this was 2004, they’d have an excuse, but it’s not.
And, yes, I’d be willing to put down $100 and a case of beer that PHP will have more marketshare in the top 100 than Rails. Care to take me up on that bet? Oh, unfair because companies like Yahoo! and Facebook aren’t going to die anytime soon? How about we take the top 100 from Seth Goodin’s Web 2.0 list next year and bet again for the year after? That should be fair because in the last year Ruby and PHP books have sold at an equal clip and “Ruby is the language for Web 2.0″ while PHP isn’t.
Thanks for playing. Next!
@LovePHP: That’s a win-win. Peeps get their Ruby books and I get discounts on my next lens purchase.
He’s pröbåbly säiing Ii’m a dwëëb! (but that’s cool anyway).
“I’m real pissed.”
Hehe.
web brick.
need i say more?
ps. fuck php.
Shame on the fudding…
That’s all this article really is, sadly.
- The ROR framework has loads of advantages over PHP.
- PHP has 2 advantages over ROR: It scales properly and it’s a proven solution.
PHP didn’t scale well in the beginning and was hell to setup.
PHP was unproven in the beginning, and everyone who didn’t “get” LAMP was ragging on it.
This is exacly what Terry is doing here.
Saying “PHP is in all the top sites” is not an argument… ROR is new.
Was PHP in all the top sites when it was first gaining momentum? Of course not.
Within a couple of years, ROR will be finely-tuned and scale as well if not better than PHP. The ROR community is growing too fast, and ROR developers love it too much for this not too happen – once you go ROR you don’t go back.
And at that point PHP, unless it adapted, will be fully deprecated.
Framework-less coding is dead. Developing without convention is dead. Practicality over elegance is dead.
And that’s the reality… would be wiser to indeed “get it” than be left behind in a few years… (kinda like record companies and the whole mp3 revolution…)
@Icyhot: Let’s agree to disagree. You prefer fear; I prefer humor. You prefer to talk theory; I prefer to use facts. You imagine the future; I live the reality.
But you certainly must have an overly developed sense of Ruby on Rail’s importance if you think that I fear it. I actually wish RoR all the luck in proving me wrong. They’ll need it.
Please write more about how PHP is dead and how people like me don’t “get it” about bloated architectural frameworks. Cheer when DHH tells me, “Fuck You!”
Prove the whole point of my article.
@tychay: Please point to the part in my post where I say “PHP is dead”.
There is no point to prove in your article.
You are comparing a language that’s been in use for 10+ years now to a framework that is just starting to make it’s mark. Apples and oranges within two different time periods.
Soon enough ROR will scale properly – what will be your argument then?
What possible advantage could you have coding with a framework-less system and a language that wasn’t conceived as object-oriented from the ground up to create the next generations of applications
Frameworks are bloated?
Yes, they do indeed add overhead.
That’s their cost.
But with a framework you save on development time & costs and maintenance time.
Same applies to convention and elegance.
Unmanageable code is of no use to anyone but the original developer himself. By stressing convention and elegance, anyone can take over the development of any project. Any project can build over another project with simplicity. Every project becomes easy to maintain.
PHP was the king.
Coding without a framework was never a good idea.
Something better has come along.
Let’s just leave it time to develop properly.
No reason to pout.
Well, the first point is that the result of this FUD actually is just a bunch of PHP developers clapping their hands, but nobody in RoR community really cared about this trolling, in fact it’s too low level
) why there are so many Rails clones written in PHP ? I remember 2 but I’ve never been really interested in this.
And where’s that piece about Paul Graham and Joel Spolsky ? Deleted ? Because really – I was laughing my ass off …
Anyway, can I ask you a few questions ?
1) Where was PHP 2 years after the release of the first stable interpreter ? Nowhere ? (dude, if you can compare a language to a framework I can ask what I want, we both know we’re going nowhere here, but honestly with a post like this one where do you want to go ? (Slashdot I would say :p)
2) If PHP is such a beautiful tool (Rails-lang, the language DHH and the others used to build RoR, is very limited unfortunately – we could use Ruby instead, but what the hell … unfortunately in Rails you *can’t* write pure “Rails-lang” modules, you have to stick with MVC
5 stars out of 5, incredibly entertaining
You know, J2EE and ASP have been around for as almost as long as PHP, both have better engineers working on them than Ruby does. Both have scalability problems that PHP lacks. The combined marketshare of both is still less than PHP.
See as an architect for successful internet company whose built many successful products in PHP, I live in the reality of the serious deficiencies of my language du jour, and I never cover it up. Nor do I ever feel that PHP and Ruby is an either-or proposition nor that PHP doesn’t have stuff to learn from Ruby. Nearly every good thing in PHP has come from outside PHP.
In software, I’m practical instead of religious. Which is why they pay me insane bucks. On the other hand, that big chip on your shoulder is going to be the undoing of the Rails world.
Rails is going to dominate PHP in two year? Keep smoking the CRACK PIPE. Must be some good shit there.
Answer to ngw’s questions:
1) Two years after PHP/fi or Zend Core 1? Two years after former there was the latter and it was the the dirty little secret of many successful startups. Two years after the latter, it was the dominant language for internet development and installed on nearly every ISP.
Also, if you’re talking Ruby for web development then you mean Rails. The Java world has more than J2EE, but not so for the Ruby world. As many others have pointed out, The Rails framework and Ruby for Web are synonymous. I find it an amusing dodge that whenever Rails people can, they talk about “Ruby” and then when they’re being attacked they go for the “We’re not Ruby, we’re a framework.” What sort of psychology goes into that? I mean the Java developers never try this defense when I talk about J2EE.
Hilarious shit.
2) I say many times that PHP is as ugly as a ball of nails. And the rest of your gibberish sounds like I’m arguing with a fan of Smarty Template System.
As for my take on Rails-like frameworks in PHP. My take is well documented on this blog and I have an even a stricter take on frameworks in general.
You may disagree with me. You may think I’m wrong. You are certainly entitled to think that I’m offensive and abrasive.
But I’m not a hypocrite.
Ruby peeps, keep the comments coming! Oh yeah, and tell me the supplier of your chronic. Must be some good shit.
Oh yes, another PHP security gem from my blog archives. Enjoy!
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@tychay
Do yourself a favor tychay, reread this entire page, (when not in a “I’m the king of the world” mood) and perhaps you’ll realize how obtuse you come off. You sound exactly like all the microsoft fudders that were speaking out againt Linux. You also seem to enjoy being a troll on your blog…
But like I said, don’t take my word for it, reread your page.
Good luck to you, I’ve wasted enough time on this.
@Icyhot: I reread the post and comments and now what I realize what an asshole I sound like when I defend Mac from the “Microsoft FUDders”…
I sound just like you.
The only differences are: I talk facts not innuendo; I’m willing to back my statement with $100 and a case of beer (plus there is the public humiliation I’d receive for having to eat my words); my information is listed publicly.
I’m passionate. I’m an asshole. I certainly don’t take it personally.
As for me “trolling on my own blog.” Thanks for reminding me that this is my own blog. I have always encouraged people to respond to me on their own blogs where I have been happy to link them! (I even go in and manually link if I find out about it and don’t get a trackback.)
If you read the commented links (which you haven’t), you’d find that some of these trackbacks generate thoughtful discussion, others point out errors in my article. Almost all of them have added to the conversation.
But very few responses engage in ad hominems.
I wonder why?
My guess: $100 and a case a beer… too risky?
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1) Basically you say that 2 years after the release of PHP it was the “secret of many startups”, exactly what Rails is now. The distinction between a *language* and a *framework* makes sense for every script kiddie, if it doesn’t for you it’s your problem. If the problem is that PHP isn’t a general purpose language but useful only on the web, it’s still your problem, Ruby isn’t.
2) So what’s your point ? What is all this shit about being “flexible and powerful” ? Dude, I was doing Ruby *years* before Rails, you must be on crack to think that Ruby isn’t – it’s a pure OO language, PHP not even close, it has *strong* metaprogramming features, does PHP have metaprogramming at all ? – just to name a few, I think the fact that *PHP doesn’t have namespaces* . When Rails is too strict you write a module in Ruby, and that’s all.
Oh, one last thing, you say that if everyone is using the same technology for solving the same problem it means that that technology is the best for the domain. So in 2000 you were an ASP3 developer correct ?
ahahahah, enough fun, I always lose interest to trolls
“Practicality over elegance is dead.”
That is my favorite quote ever.
I should mention Terry’s accomplishments. If you have done more, please speak up.
1. Saved Qixo from death (with PHP and aggressive scraping).
2. Saved My Casa Network from death (with PHP, SOAP).
3. Saved Plaxo from death (through e-cards).
What do these have in common? If you said only PHP, you are wrong. They were built using non-framework, scalable architectures. He could have built them in Ruby, and it would be better than work of a Ruby developer. Why? It’s a point of view that’s different. It’s not just PHP.
If you are smart, you could learn something from Terry.
Dave
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Michael links this article when he talks about hooking Powerset onto Ruby…or is it Rails?
Holy crap Terry! I thought I was the only one out here. Seriously! I’ve been getting so sick and tired of all the framework whoring dimensia causing tribal zeal in PHP anymore that I was seriously considering getting out of IT alltogether.
I mean c’mon! You know it’s bad when you tell it like it concerning the overhead of things like ActiveRecord or other ORM’s only to become a pariah! Is it just me or are we seeing the drawbacks of these things now? I told a freind of mine back in Januarary (or however you spell it) that the problem with these completely managed frameworks (RonR, Cake) is that they have a much lower performance ceiling.
Oh hey……, uh…. didn’t Alex Payne say something like that?
>>Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling issues -
issues that any growing site eventually contends with – far sooner
Where’s the rest of my post?
@BDKR: It got put into the moderation thing and I was out… drink^H^H^H^H^H^Hworking.
Interesting discussion on PHP Developers Network on frameworks and language.
I just found interesting survey result from Apache Friend (XAMPP creator).
since XAMPP is a tools for a web developer, so I can say this could be a reflection about current web developer opinion about their prefered languange/framework.
link: http://www.apachefriends.org/files/surveys/af-survey-2007-raw.pdf
PS: watching 2 RoR ‘funniest home video’, I see nothing funny but RoR arrogancy (which I thought it just rumours) and a bad marketing strategy, really….
It’s either great or horribly embarassing to know that I’m the same here as there.
Thanks!
I can’t see why it’d be horribly embarrassing (:
It was just that your way of arguing is surprisingly consistent between here and IRL. I find the degree to which people invest themselves in web frameworks and CMSes pretty ridiculous, be it RoR, WordPress, Drupal, etc., but I never really feel the need to turn to a vitriolic-but-hilarious pissing contest…
@rebecca: good thing to know my hilarity is tempered by my vitriol.
Great rant. If there is one thing where you go offbase it is the argumentum ad populum of saying that PHP is best because so many sites use it. Otherwise, spot on.
@l.thomas: I said it “may be” the best. The argument ad populum was in order to imply it is certainly a safe bet because the problems you might run into in a highly scalable site have already known best practice solutions in the PHP world. But, point taken.
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The problem with statistics about what software stacks the top sites on the internet run is that it takes a while for sites to be built, and longer for them to become popular. If Yahoo wanted to rebuild their site in Ruby On Rails, they wouldn’t be done tomorrow. It took them many years to get where they are today, and it would take many years for them to get there again in Rails. What will be interesting is to note what stacks the top sites are running 10 years from now. Rails has been around in a production usable form for less than two years. How many of the top 100 sites are less than two years old? You can write a successful, scalable, fast site in a variety of languages on a variety of platforms, PHP definitely included. However, ease of writing that site and maintainability are important factors too, at which Rails excels. It’ll be some time before we can decisively say whether the development community has has chosen PHP or Rails as de facto, and at that point there will probably be another newcomer anyway. For now, buzz and the choices today’s upstarts are making is a pretty good bellwether of what’s to come.
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