Luke Murphy wrote:Hi Bruce,
How do you see:
Groovy +JSF versus Ruby on Rails versus PHP
Three ways to get hot deployment and instant turnaround.
Could you give any compelling reasons to go for Ruby on Rails (or PHP)?
Other questions:
- Why did you leave out PHP from your seven other languages?
- Do you use any comparison matrix's in the book?
Reason, I find a lot of technical comparisons can be quite verbose and a matriix which indicates features oftens summarises information really well. For example, Web Frameworks comparisons. Did you use any in your book? Or was it a case you are looking at completly different features in each language?
Cheers
Groovy/Grails has actually evolved a lot. It is a good language and framework. I don't think you get all of the metaprogramming or coding simplicity that you get with Ruby, but it is definitely a good starting point if you have lots of
Java requirements to satisfy. PhP has obviously been around and very successful for a long time. I think that many people make a mistake and think that PhP is cheap because bad PhP developers are cheap. (That's becoming true of Ruby too.) But PhP done right can be almost beautiful in its own right. I think that over PhP, I like Rails because it gives you deeper, richer programming abstractions. So Rails is slower and less compatible and deployable in some instances than either of the other two instances. I use it because to me, it is the language that best optimizes the programmer. In my business of building complicated software for new startups, speed and cleanliness mean everything, and I've not yet been able to replicate that in another framework. But other teams have had great success with both PhP and Groovy/Grails.
Lots of good questions here. I left off PhP because it's already too popular (as is Perl/C/Java/C#). I didn't build any comparison matrix, but that would have been a good idea. This book was more about the learning process than a tit-for-tat comparison. It seems like when I do those kinds of comparisons, someone always gets ticked off. Don't get me wrong. Sometimes that needs to happen. But in this case, ticking someone off would not advance the book or the ideas in it.