Is "RUBY" going to get ahead of "PHP"

Will the programming language "PHP" be out of date, since "RUBY" is gaining so much momentum?

No.

The web is full of fads and buzzwords. At the moment we have AJAX, Ruby, "Web 2.0", etc. Most people don't really understand them, but want to jump on the bandwagon because they're cool.

Use the right tool for the job, and you'll be cooler than Fonzie.

demolicious | leafish

While I wouldn't relegate Ruby to /dev/null or the fad bin, I would say this.
Ruby's chances of eclipsing PHP are about the same as a snowballs chance in hell.

Here's why...
#1 Installed base, PHP is on MOST webservers at the moment, for a webhost to provide Ruby services along with PHP they would need to install and secure it, which poses a liability to anyone who may be on a shared hosting arrangement, since the server now has yet another possible attack vector.

#2 Ruby is SLOW! Code written in Ruby runs an order of magnitude slower than code written in PHP with Zend installed and operating properly. This is just the nature of the Ruby interpeter.

#3 AJAX is currently mis-applied. AJAX is now being used as a buzzword, while it does have it's place like for instance gmail, or anyother situation where a snappy interactive user experience is expected, it is not suitable for day to day surfing sites, and in most instances gets in the way.
Also Ajax can just as easily be carried out by using PHP, and all of this without the headache and overhead of a Ruby interpeter.

#4 Dedicated user community. Currently Ruby does not even approach the level of devotion and dedication that PHP enjoys, while this MAY change in the future I highly doubt it. I for one have been developing in PHP since PHP3, and decided to give Ruby a whirl, I was not at all impressed. Most people whom I have spoken to, seem to be of the same mind.

#5 Ruby on Rails != AJAX, as stated above there are a lot of otherways to pull off AJAX without using Ruby, and without incurring it's overhead. Ruby on Rails is one of many, many frameworks for AJAX, and I would venture a guess that there are in fact far more implemenations of Rails style frameworks under PHP than there is for Ruby.

Ruby is hardly new. Its been actively around for a long while. Its a bit younger than Python but still older, I suspect, than some reading this text :-)

"Will Drupal be competitive in 5 years from now, eventhough it is build on php?"

PHP is a horrible kludge.

But competitive? Around a dozen or so years ago I recall in a phone conversation with Tim Berners-Lee he said "I think we're too late. We've missed the window of opportunity. " We are "at least 6 months to late to market to catch up with the momentum of Gopher" he said. The worry was that people are not going to bother to write HTML. My response was that they don't have to but that the "world" is hypertext. Needless to say within a few years with the rapid growth of the Internet most never even heard of "Gopher".

Do you want, however, my honest opinion of where Drupal might be in the marketplace in 5 years? Does it matter?

--
Edward C. Zimmermann <edz@nonmonotonic.net>
BSn's Nonmonotonic Lab

Interesting read: Is Ruby brainwashing us?.

I get the strong impression that some people are investing a LOT of money and effort into promoting Ruby on Rails; and that rather than use older advertising methods, they are doing this via independent-sounding posts, blogs, etc in influential developer communities.

I get this impression because what *I* see is lots of posts saying "wow, there's lots of posts about RoR". Seems there are more posts commenting on the fact that there's so many posts about RoR, than there are posts about RoR. Think about it.

These posts tend to take the form of fake questions such as "What is all this fuss about Ruby?" - and then proceed to provide a "teaser" of an answer, followed by a number of links to websites which provide more detailed answers, and in turn link to the owners of an oddly-named website that must be raking it in right now...

Internet is so much fun. Ruby has been there for years but why so much buzz in last 1 year? Is it because of RoR framework? Or is it just because every few years we look for something new to jump on? It was Web 2.0, AJAX, Ruby . now Web 3.0.. :-)

Tool is as good as the number of applications/products out there using that tool/language. There is definitely interest in people trying it out. Performance is definitely a big issue that I keep hearing from people.

Look at PHP Applications out there - there is just tons and tons and there are more developers getting onto it every minute. PHP is just at its early days and as there are more enterprise open source applications released in community, there will be a huge following. Who wants to pay for Support anyway? And even if you Pay for Support, you may have to wait for the next patch/release cycle. Better to use open source product where you have total control over the product.

Where will Drupal be in 5 years? :-) I think the challenge is whether Drupal can consolidate all the development and get rid of redundancy in modules. There are just too many people out there writing code, extending tables, etc without understanding really what exists out there.

Need for Architecture/Standards/Technical Documentation is very very important at this stage of the game. Everyone is busy. Yes, Drupal has an absolutely lovely framework. How can you have a controlled evolution on such a product if a question I have no idea.

Someone really needs to spend time and put in concentrated effort to manage this else Drupal will outgrow its own capacity and this will not be good.

But again - in Today's Open Source CMS out there, there is nothing as robust, extensible, granular out there like Drupal. So if any CMS has to stay, it will be Drupal for sure. :-)

Roshan

The question is, will Ruby help create more efficient CMSs as Drupal, or not?

I have heard a lot about Ruby performance issues, but there are ways to speed it up by using special Apache mods, for instance. Here's a link on where various Ruby platforms are compared:
http://blog.kovyrin.net/2006/08/28/ruby-performance-results/

Anyone compared Ruby vs PHP performance on large database-driven websites?

Thanks.

You are right about a CMS also requiring usability and all that SE-friendliness.

However, I was earlier concerned with the performance and scalability issues of Ruby.

I have listened to an interview with David Hansson and he said that Ruby scales pretty well and often custom coding is not required.

Thanks for your comments, though.

I do think I'll learn Ruby as the first programming language, though.

We can always rewrite Drupal in Ruby :-)

What are we gonna name it? Drubal? Druby?

There is no question that Ruby is an elegant, easy to learn and understand language and that RoR is a powerful framework. It's true that there is the element of fad at work in all the hoopla, in part because the company that kicked it off - 37 Signals - and many of the folks who first embraced it have a lot of design and marketing savvy. However, if you look past the savvy branding and at the framework, you will see merit there that is sure to stand the test of (internet) time. RoR is no flash in the pan and it seems to be gaining traction in the commercial sphere much faster than PHP ever did.

PHP is not likely going anywhere, though. It's a fast, easy to language to learn and it is supported by even the cheapest web hosts. Ruby's growth is constrained somewhat at this juncture by the higher demands it places on cheap shared hosting providers both in terms of configuration complexity and resource use. You can get cheap Ruby, but it is not nearly so abundant nor often as cheap as cheap PHP. And a lot of the most-used Ruby providers (like Dreamhost) still seem to be finding their way amidst complaints. This is the kind of thing that killed all the buzz around Plone a while back, although Ruby seems to be easier to host cheaply than Plone.

Finally, a lot of good apps have been written in PHP and it will just be too hard to migrate them all. It is doubtful that RoR is so productive that everything currently written in PHP can be rewritten profitably. Also, elegant frameworks like Drupal (and Wordpress and CakePHP) remove a lot of the ugliness from PHP, while leveraging its bent toward rapid development. RoR has a long way to go to render them obsolete. It makes much more sense for the different development communities to cross-pollinate than to compete.

They key to the popularity of PHP, is the vast availability of cheap hosting services.

How many hosts are there offering Ruby? Negligible compared with PHP providing hosts.

As others have mentioned, Python is also a great language, and was also hyped to take over the web, just like Ruby. Now did I miss the take over? No, it was nothing but buzz and hype. And with all the buzz about buzz, what marketers seem to neglect to mention, is that buzz doesn't matter, if the product is crap or is not well supported.

Cheap hosting has to be regarded as a form of support, in the sense of available infrastructure. And economically product infrastructure has to be a commodity (low cost). E.g. computers, computer networks, network access, if in all these hadn't undergone commodification, [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodification ], we would have the Internet and web we all love today.

The reason Ruby is being chatted so much about, is because of ROR (Ruby on Rails), which is comparable to PHP-Cake [ http://www.cakephp.org/ ]. And in my opinion, the difference between Cake/ROR and Drupal is the focus. Drupal tries to serve both, the casual user (no coding experience), as well as the skilled developer, which automatically covers everything in between. While Cake/ROR are targeted solely towards developers of web apps.

A "designer" can grab Drupal and get a site up, but if they get their hands on Cake/ROR....shudder....