December 2008

There’s a growing turmoil in the web framework space. First good old PHP turned everyone, including yours truly, into web programmers, and now that it’s become old hat, we all want to move to something sexier and sleeker…something object-oriented, perhaps, like Ruby on Rails or Django.

And it turns out that the Sexy One (Rails) is cranking out a new version every couple of weeks. I pity the poor guys at Pragmatic trying to crank out a 1200 page Rails book that will be obsolete before it hits the bookshelves. And now that Rails has absorbed Merb (a lighter, swifter Rails), it looks like Rails has become the 800 pound gorilla at the Cool Ruby Guys Convention.

The creator of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf, has steadfastly maintained that PHP, and other scripting languages, are great for gluing things together, but when it’s crunch time, you have to bring the big guns, C++, as they do at Yahoo! Or Java.

I am amused at the fair number of Ruby enthusiasts (including David Hannson (Rails’ creator) himself) who admits to using PHP “to get things done.” The fact is that Rails is good for some things eventually, and PHP is good at doing lots of things immediately.

One thing that I’ve noticed in the development process at our startup is that the language we use is not the one we thought we would use. We decided to use PHP because that was what we all knew. PHP is a cinch to learn if you know C++ or Java.

But now we find that our choice of language is becoming less relevant than we had envisioned. It really wouldn’t matter whether we use PHP or Rails or Django or any of the dozen other web platforms. It turns out that we spend about 25% of our time working with the “stack” and with PHP. The rest of the time, we work in another language. And you know what language that is. It’s the language that we back-end programmers has negelected for oh, so long—JavaScript.

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If you’re a Ruby on Rails Devotee, you must be feeling stuffed and satiated now that Rails has swallowed Merb.

In case you haven’t been watching this merger play out, Merb is another Ruby web framework, leaner, faster, and a little more mavericky than Rails. Now that Rails has become the Establishment, Merb is the upstart kid pointing out that the King is a little naked—that is to say, Active Record doesn’t scale very well.

Some harsh words have passed between the two groups. DHH has ranted about the “b******t” coming from the Merb crowd. He doesn’t have much patience with the Merb kids pulling Old Man Rails’ beard these last few months. You can check out the latest news at my favorite source of Ruby scuttlebutt rubyinside.com.

Anyway, Rails won. Merb has been annexed for the Greater Good of the Ruby Community.

The Merb honchos have proclaimed the merger “a fairly momentous day in the history of Ruby web frameworks”. Maybe there’s a little hyperbole in there—it would be momentous if Google had acquired Merb. We know what happens when the Big Fish consumes the little fish: you never see the little fish again.

All the same, this is a momentous event in the history of Merb because little Merb will now disappear from the landscape, like a unique, beautiful snow flake falling into the cold North Atlantic. Now that Rails has a tractor beam on Merb, I find that I’ve lost interest in Merb. So, too, is my interest in Rails fading into the past. I’m still working with Rails 1.2.5, and now Rails is moving from 2.2 to 3.0.

My predominant feeling is this: The more I have to deal with the Little Details of Rails (including the barrage of new versions month after month), the more I crave the Constant, the Stable, the Universal, the General Principles of PHP. I never thought I’d say that, but there it is.

Love Live PHP.

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