Ruby on Rails Vs PHP: Which is better?

Ruby on Rails vs. PHP: Which is better?

First, let’s try to understand why you want to select a specific technology. All technologies thrive from tools, developer community, libraries, and applications. As a business owner, you may want technology that can last for many years beyond the start of the project.

As a developer, you want technology that can be maintained long enough to get a good return on your investment. Business owners or developers will often make their decisions with their peers and the developer community in mind, based on which technologies are strongly recommended.

In this post, we will briefly take a look at the pros and cons of PHP and Ruby on Rails. We will see how PHP and Ruby on Rails can be compared with common points such as maintenance, performance, scalability, costs and support.

Comparing PHP to Ruby on Rails is not fair at all. PHP is much more popular than Ruby on Rails because Ruby on Rails is a web development framework, not a programming language. Ruby is the language that runs the Ruby on Rails framework on the backend, and PHP is the programming language used to code and build websites and web applications.

Ruby on Rails should be compared to Symfony2, Zend Framework, Codeigniter, Laravel, CakePHP, and many other PHP-based web development frameworks. So, to understand why Ruby on Rails is so popular, it’s best to visualize what people are searching for.

This Google trend chart above shows that all PHP web development frameworks still don’t add up to the number of searches performed for Ruby on Rails (shown in blue). In fact, the only web framework that is growing in the world of PHP is Laravel. So why is Ruby on Rails so popular?

Well, a big part of building a web app is deciding which libraries you want to use, how to organize your web app, and many other factors. To date, many PHP projects are still not using a mature and proven web application development framework. Many PHP developers would prefer to create a new PHP framework, instead of using the more popular frameworks like Zend Framework, Symfony2, etc.

Due to the complexities of an application, as with any framework, you will have to spend a lot of time learning how to use that particular framework. Therefore, Ruby on Rails attempts to simplify the process of learning its framework by refusing configuration over conventions; In other words, you (the developer or business owner) have little time to decide when it comes to organizing, running, or even hosting the application.

This may sound like a good thing, and for the most part, it really is, which is why Ruby on Rails is so popular. However, since then many PHP web application development frameworks have recognized it and are following in the footsteps of Ruby on Rails web development. This could be why the growth of the Ruby on Rails community has stagnated in recent years. Now, while the other web development frameworks show up in a small percentage, you still have to keep in mind that PHP is entirely web-focused. So pretty much anything you write in PHP will run on the web, whereas in Ruby there aren’t many options for you as to what code you can write to develop a web application.

1. Scalability and ease of maintenance

Whether it’s PHP or Ruby on Rails, they both provide the ability to scale. However, due to the amount of resources Ruby uses compared to PHP, scalability issues will arise much earlier in your application’s life cycle. Scaling an application in Ruby on Rails versus PHP will fix very common problems. Therefore, the scale will be based on how the application was designed. There are also online services to help with scaling issues, such as using Rackspace Cloud Sites or Amazon Elastic Beanstalk.

The situation becomes very different when you go from wanting to scale to needing to scale. When a developer doesn’t have the expertise to scale an application, the most common route is to find online articles, tutorials, and other resources to learn. So when it comes to scaling a website, there are a lot of resources written and available for PHP developers, while Ruby on Rails has a much smaller group of developer community.

As for easy maintenance, it totally depends on the organization of the web application. As long as the web developer uses a web development framework, general maintenance is much easier. PHP offers a massive selection of web development frameworks, all designed for specific goals, while Ruby has a limited selection (apart from Ruby on Rails).

2.Speed ​​and performance

Since PHP is a programming language and Ruby on Rails is a web application development framework, you should take performance with a grain of salt. The goal of using a full web development framework is to gain productivity at the cost of speed. So let’s shed some light on this.

Here is a table from a very simple “hello world” web application. Below you can see how fast PHP is when it comes to requests – remember, it’s a language designed specifically for the web. However, once you start introducing popular full-stack web application development frameworks, performance drops and requests per second approach the Ruby on Rails number.

In fact, a famous PHP web development framework, Laravel, starts to perform worse than Ruby on Rails. As a result, many benchmarks are useless, because there is much more to the speed and performance of a web application than the web development language or framework. For example, delays in the network, database system, and caching mechanisms can contribute to a 10x to 100x slowdown. So how the app is designed is much more important than the programming language or web development framework behind it.

3. Cost

Scarcity is a fundamental concept of economics. So if you have 10 PHP web developers for every Ruby web developer, and the role of the project is language dependent, there will be a clear winner on cost. PHP, due to its strong competition, has lower prices. As a business owner, if your motive is cost-based, this should be a very helpful incentive. There is the saying “You get what you pay for”, but that does not mean that you have to pay the same amount for the experience available. PHP has a very easy learning curve. On top of that, many PHP developers are new to programming in general and web application programming in particular.

On the other hand, Ruby is a more difficult language to learn, so people who choose that language already know how to program. It’s quite natural for a PHP developer to switch to Ruby on Rails, and his experience in the world ported from PHP to Ruby. In fact, many Ruby developers were PHP developers. So why are developers jumping to Ruby on Rails? Well this answer would be the same for pretty much any other programming language other than PHP.

In any other language (except PHP), the language will limit you in the code you can write, as well as what is available to use. Therefore, it becomes a common method to create web applications in that language. For example, C# has ASP.NET, Python has Django, Node.js has Express, Lua has Orbit, and the list goes on. So, to put this in perspective, let’s say you have the choice of engaging with a massive audience or being among select professionals who share the same goals. It would make sense that the most recognized applications are built in the languages ​​that have the largest audience, therefore PHP is the target language. Applications like WordPress, Drupal, Magento, Facebook, are just a small part of the many available applications, which are written in PHP.

When it comes to hosting your Ruby on Rails applications, costs can add up very quickly. You’ll have a harder time finding a host that supports a Ruby on Rails application, and the big brands don’t come cheap. They start at $40 and quickly jump to $500 or more. There are even some companies that offer free hosting but will charge a lot of fees when they need to expand their hosting needs. Almost all hosting companies that offer Ruby on Rails hosting will also provide PHP hosting. Some of the cheaper hosting providers offer old and outdated versions of Ruby (the language), limiting you to older versions of Ruby on Rails. They also run your Ruby on Rails app as CGI, which is the slowest way to run your web app.