PHP vs Ruby on Rails, Part 2

In part 1 we explained how PHP is just a language, yet we never really talked about Ruby, the language in which Rails is written. Ruby is a fun and interesting language in its own right; however, it has gotten a lot more spotlight these days, specifically because of Rails. So, if you are using Rails you’ll be writing Ruby code, and now it’s time to compare some aspects of Ruby to PHP.
For me, the biggest difference between Ruby and PHP is that Ruby is an object-oriented language throughout, while PHP’s object model feels more like an afterthought. In Ruby everything is an object, while in PHP most everything is a native variable type.

I’ve been using object-oriented design exclusively for a few years now, and while I continue to model my PHP web applications with objects, they can be very awkward at times. When this happens I’m usually forced to jump back to procedural programming to do things like iterate over a collection of objects. Iterators, by the way, are very cool in Ruby. For example, in Ruby I can do something like:

employees.each {|employee| employee.give_raise}

That .each statement lets me iterate over the collection and then use the reference between the pipes as a way to perform actions onto the object. In this case, giving each employee a raise.

In PHP few things are objects by default, including collections. Instead, there is a native array type and a bunch of functions that you can pass an array to that do something of interest. For small scripts this doesn’t bother me, but for my bigger projects it’s a real pain. Early on I even considered writing my own array object. I quickly let the idea die when I came to realize I’d have to pass out native array types to the various tools (like Smarty and a number of other PEAR Objects) anyway, as that’s what they knew how to work with.

So those are some of the biggest reasons why I’m starting to prefer Ruby over PHP, but this comparison still has one more part: deployment. What good is an app if you can’t put it onto a production server? In the final installment of this comparison we’ll look at the differences in deploying a Rails app vs a PHP app. See you then.