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Ruby on Rails framework or Akelos PHP framework?

S

Stiganator

Platinum Member
What do you feel is the best infrastructure for building a website like that of anandtech?

Any peeves about either, which is fastest/easiest?

Which is more secure?

What are pros and cons of each?
 
More often than not, you can make do with a popular CMS like Drupal or Joomla or many others.

As an example, The Onion is run off Drupal. You can get a general idea of what a CMS like Drupal can do for you:
http://drupal.org/handbook/is-drupal-right-for-you

And some examples:
http://drupal.org/cases

While I've mentioned Drupal as one candidate, there are many other CMSes that you can evaluate. Go to opensourcecms.com and try out some of the demos they have. They let you log in as an admin and play around with the system to your heart's content.

Also, I strongly suggest staying away from PHPNuke and that family of CMSes.

On the other hand, if you feel that you needs are to specific to be met by a CMS, you can look into Rails or its cousins in PHP land. Symfony, CakePHP, CodeIgnitor are a few names that come to mind. Even Zend has their own framework (which I've never looked into).

The problem with many of these PHP based frameworks (or Rails clones, whatever you want to call them) is poor documentation. Symfony shines here because they have good documentation (and a great book by Apress, which is free online). They also have a shell prompt thing going which I like. Some people don't like a command line interface and prefer Cake. Frameworks in PHP are like 31 flavors - there's something for everyone.

One last note: do not consider Rails unless you intend to get a dedicated server. While many shared hosts will run Rails, many (if not most) of them have a bad time efficiently running your FastCGI processes.

Originally posted by: Stiganator
Which is more secure?
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If well written, a home-made system can be more secure than a popular CMS powered website. If a security bug is found for a particular CMS and you do not update your code, a hacker could use that to his advantage.

On the other hand, large open source applications tend to be more secure than something written by a handful of people in a single office, because open source code is looked over by hundreds, if not thousands of people. YMMV.

What are pros and cons of each?
Click to expand...

It is hard to answer more than I have above without knowing more about the website you want to make.
 
Originally posted by: George P Burdell
Originally posted by: troytime
i hate rails

not just for the code, but also because of the guy who started it
Click to expand...

Back story? Did he up and steal your girlfriend? 😀
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no he's just a POS. i've seen his code (the original), its slop.
very little of it remains in the framework, yet he still refers to the work as HIS (in entirety)

he wouldn't be anywhere without the marketing team of 37signals and the fanboistic cult that follows them around shlobbing their knobs
 
Originally posted by: George P Burdell
Originally posted by: troytime
he wouldn't be anywhere without the marketing team of 37signals and the fanboistic cult that follows them around shlobbing their knobs
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Agreed
Click to expand...

my boss sent me and my dev team to their building of basecamp workshop

the amount of asskissing going on was way over the top.
the highlight of it all was going to weber grill after
 
Ok that is good to know, I could potentially use a dedicated server, some of my friends have a 10 Mb colo, but I was thinking of just using the cheap godaddy hosting that I have. In that case would you say php is the way to go?
 
I am sorry I have to disagree with the anti-fanboism going on in this thread.

The problems with Ruby on Rails stems have little to do with the language of Ruby or the Framework of Rails. Ruby and Rails are pretty slick in its latest version and in my opinion is the best solution while we all wait, wait and wait some more for Perl 6 and it's VM.

RoR is by far one of the easiest language to learn OOP on and it does things very well. While you will have to make sure you can find a host for RoR you would have to make sure you could find a PHP 5.x server host as well. Many are still on 4.x even if they have 5 installed you could find yourself on an unstable and unsafe server.

Ruby however, is a sluggish beast in a shared environment. It could be summed up that Ruby on Rails is as robust as J2EE for enterprise but at the same time as easy as PHP 5. The mod community is shaping up to be the next CPAN like PERL has. However, you WILL want to run on a dedicated server and have gobs of RAM.

Right now I run 1 Microsoft Box at work with 2 gig and Windows 2003. It took quite a while to get the reverse proxy to work as intended *read that as I bought ISAPI Rewrite*. IIS 7 will change this but as it stands that is not due out until next year and you DO NOT WANT to run RoR through fast cgi since the fast cgi for IIS is still pretty experimental. My one requirement at work is to support ASP ( Jscript code ), .NET, PHP and Perl legacy code that run through IIS. I had a project that needed to get out the door and to be the basis of all code refactor for the old legacy code. RoR and .NET were the only options and this has to be 100% 508 and have proper support for screen scrapers. So, I made the choice to go RoR because I could have full control over the views and very intuitive model/controller environment.

So, if you go windows go PHP and one of the Rails-like frameworks like cake or even the zend framework if you don't have time for setting up 3rd party software and paying for it. If you go linux you could go Ruby on Rails no problem.

My toolbox for RoR on windows is :

IIS 6 ( obviously )
Ruby
Ruby on Rails
ISAPI Rewrite ( paid edition for reverse proxy support )
Mongrel webserver


Also, don't forget about Python/Zope framework which would get you Plone. Also, Linux recommended for Python environment for the same reasons for Ruby.
 
However, you WILL want to run on a dedicated server and have gobs of RAM.
Click to expand...

so, even a small site needs a dedicated box with a ton of ram
and if your site gets bigger you're screwed because RoR scales like a small latex glove

ruby is great for learning though
 
Originally posted by: troytime
However, you WILL want to run on a dedicated server and have gobs of RAM.
Click to expand...

so, even a small site needs a dedicated box with a ton of ram
and if your site gets bigger you're screwed because RoR scales like a small latex glove

ruby is great for learning though
Click to expand...

That is not exactly what I said. Small sites are usually based on shared hosting. You don't know exactly what you are going to get. Someone could bring the system down with a heavy resourced application.

Also, ruby doesn't work like php. A good comfortable medium sized site with medium visitors, such as a small community of 500 people, would need a 64mb sandbox. Also remember that most RoR hosters are virtual server hosts. This is not the same world of cheap PHP host vendors.

Also, RoR doesn't scale like a small latex glove. It scales similarly to J2EE. Mongrel has a clustering solution to load balance your servers. Saying Ruby on Rails doesn't scale well is just admitting absolute ignorance. Python also requires a good dedicated server to run a large site comfortable but unlike Ruby, there is no Mongrel Cluster solution which leaves you to load balance through conventional solutions. Mongrel Clusters can be run from the same machine in their own memory space, or from other machines. It is a brilliant solution to a scalability problem.

I am not saying that PHP5 cannot be used to do what RoR can but at the same time the RoR-like PHP frameworks aren't as robust and/or mature as the Rails framework is. The upgrading of RoR, or modifying, is a very intuitive approach that doesn't really need a system admin to do.

The problem with Ruby comparisons is that people want to compare it to PHP but imo this is a mistake. RoR is comparable to STRUTS on J2EE. Also, the system resources pull from Ruby itself is comparable to JAVA. Think of Ruby as Perl/Python done right, following a KISS approach. I love PHP and use it every day; however, I have a lot of game time with RoR in the most self-taught platform ( windows ) there is for its implementation. I've found it to be very good, but it isn't for the guy who wants to buy a 5$ webhost and run a phpnuke-like site or phpbb forum.
 
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