What is the best: PHP, ASP, JSP or Ruby on Rails?

[schoolbag]

What is the best? I prefer PHP, because I know it... What operation system can run JSP?

[DPS Computing]

Well you can't say which one is the 'best' really. It depends on what you are trying to achieve. What are you writing?

[eUKhost.com]

PHP works on almost all Operating systems including windows and linux. ASP and JSP are more flexible and what you can achieve ASP.NET or JSP wont be possible with PHP.

JSP is platform independent so it works on Linux as well as Windows. ASP.NET is Microsoft product so they wont allow ASP.NET to work on Linux. Though you have chillisoft ASP for Linux to support classic ASP but ASP.NEt will work on Windows only.

[Ben]

Pretty obvious why they won't allow it on other platforms . PHP in my opinion is much, much easier to learn than ASP.NET but I have no real knowledge of any 3 programming languages so I can't really comment or choose which one is best. But PHP & JSP are probably best options because they work on most major operating systems.

[Noel]

And don't forget about Ruby On Rails, which is also fully cross platform. Really powerful and elegant. Easy to get started with but not so easy to master. As the saying goes it "makes easy things easy and difficult things possible"

[Andrew Burrage]

Originally Posted by Noel

And don't forget about Ruby On Rails, which is also fully cross platform. Really powerful and elegant. Easy to get started with but not so easy to master. As the saying goes it "makes easy things easy and difficult things possible"

Too right!

Ruby on Rails is great, and it looks so much more pretty than PHP. PHP is very well supported though, so if you want a "safe" bet it's still a good choice. I'm fairly sure RoR will overtake it in the end though.

In comparison to normal programming languages:
RoR is to PHP as Java is to C.

I don't know enough to comment on the others.

[Ben]

Originally Posted by Andrew Burrage

Too right!

Ruby on Rails is great, and it looks so much more pretty than PHP. PHP is very well supported though, so if you want a "safe" bet it's still a good choice. I'm fairly sure RoR will overtake it in the end though.

In comparison to normal programming languages:
RoR is to PHP as Java is to C.

I don't know enough to comment on the others.

I have heard about Ruby on Rails so many times; but there aren't a lot of tutorials on the net to learn it. Could it do things that PHP can & can't do? Do you know any web site hosting that has a tutorial on it, or maybe a book?

[Noel]

The best place to start is http://www.rubyonrails.com/ it's got links to documentation and tutorials and just about everything else to do with rails

Check out the tutorial "Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby" it's totally mad! (but also very good)



"Agile Web Development with Rails" and "Rails Recipes" are both excellent books.

[Ben]

Originally Posted by Noel

The best place to start is http://www.rubyonrails.com/ it's got links to documentation and tutorials and just about everything else to do with rails

Check out the tutorial "Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby" it's totally mad! (but also very good)



"Agile Web Development with Rails" and "Rails Recipes" are both excellent books.

Thanks for that Noel. I'm downloading whatever it told me to download (the RoR thing). Looks interesting and will carry on after downloading complete.

[D.TC]

Has nobody considered Perl - A little tricky to start if you are used to the C/PHP/JS/Java syntax, but once mastered is a very quick language for writing powerful software especially when combined with PHP. Well IMHO anyway. Good debuggers are available too. The only problem might be that there are fewer people around to maintain code. if you don't wish to do it yourself, and they are more expensive.

[Ben]

Perl is a very complex language and it isn't as well known as it use to be. Many people still use Perl and never have problems with it as such, but if the Perl developers want to get back into the share of the field, then they'd have to prove their programming language is better than PHP & has benefits that PHP has not got. To be honest, this Ruby on Rails seems really nice and it's something I have never come across before. It just seems so easy, even easier than PHP. Noel, I am liking your example: Finaly! got a RubyOnRails test app working! and another good reason for this is it doesn't require file extensions (for example, php - usually - requires .php extension) but Ruby on Rails doesn't - which is good for Search Engine Optimization friendliness. I also like that you could make things like login pages - I'm actually quite glad I asked you for some tutorials on this, Noel - thanks!

[Noel]

Originally Posted by Ben

Perl is a very complex language and it isn't as well known as it use to be. Many people still use Perl and never have problems with it as such, but if the Perl developers want to get back into the share of the field, then they'd have to prove their programming language is better than PHP & has benefits that PHP has not got. To be honest, this Ruby on Rails seems really nice and it's something I have never come across before. It just seems so easy, even easier than PHP. Noel, I am liking your example: Finaly! got a RubyOnRails test app working! and another good reason for this is it doesn't require file extensions (for example, php - usually - requires .php extension) but Ruby on Rails doesn't - which is good for Search Engine Optimization friendliness. I also like that you could make things like login pages - I'm actually quite glad I asked you for some tutorials on this, Noel - thanks!

Nice one Ben, thanks for the feedback on the example. According to the database you haven't yet followed the link in the sign-up email - did you receive it OK?

Of course (as always) since I wrote the code for that I've learned that there are preexisting modules available that would have saved me a lot of work on the logic. That's where the rails recipe book comes into it's own. But I've learned a lot by doing it.

I've not done much on it lately because of other (paying) commitments, but I went back to it yesterday and was very pleased at how easy it was to pick up the pieces. Whenever I've gone back to Perl projects I've done in the past It usually takes at least a day to figure out what is going on.

[Andrew Burrage]

Ben: I have to admit I have found that getting into RoR was not as straight as it could have been.
The Agile Development book Noel mentions is a very good starting place though.

Once you have some basic understanding I have found the free screencasts at Railscasts.com very helpful, plus you can watch them just to see some of the clever things that RoR does. Their sponsor peepcode.com has a introduction to rails screencast - which will probably be like an hour long, and might also be a good start, but you have to pay $9 for them. Check out the RoR forum here as well, I remember a thread where someone asked for tutorials and such, and there are some good links on there.

http://www.planetrubyonrails.com is a web site hosting that feeds a number of rails blogs together into one page. As you're continuing to understand RoR I find it very useful, as there are all sorts of interesting ideas, and lots of good links. I usually check it once a day and find at least one thing that's relevant and interesting to me.

D.TC: I have never experience pearl, but I know that it was very popular before, and allowed you to do some very powerful things. It *might* be superseded now by the current generation of web languages, but there are probably still areas where it can do things that you can't do with anything else. I have always thought of it as a bit of a "hardcore" language, how accurate is that view?

[flesso]

Perl is one of those Grandad languages which is slowly dying out, but was very popular at the time. RoR seems to be what is going to replace Perl as it currently looks. PHP is the most popular language at the moment, although this will probably be replaced by something much more powerful soon.Uptake of Microsoft's ASP.Net seems to be on the rise as well. What about Java Server Pages? I've never really seen them widely used except for enterprise level applications, could someone explain why this is?

[D.TC]

At the risk of seeming pedantic and not providing anything that can be used directly, I have still added this just in case someone finds it interesting.

Perl is a mature language, but not outdated. Most experienced Perl programmers use a terse syntax that can make it look complex. Perl is also used in applications that are too complex for the likes of PHP. In many cases it is difficult to find a replacement for Perl without becoming platform dependant, though Ruby and RoR are looking good for the future. Currently, Perl developers do not need to get back a share of the field, the bit they have lost (simpler applications) has been rightly lost. That share was only there through a previous lack of choice. As David (DPS) pointed out at the beginning of this thread, your choice 'should be based on what you are trying to achieve' and where you intend to run it (hopefully cross-platform).

Over the decades that I have been programming I have used many languages and during that time have found just three that have drastically reduced my learning times with others. This was vitally important for me in my rôle as a contract programmer as I sometimes appeared on web site hosting not knowing the particular lingo and having to get something out by the end of the week. (Those were the days – hard work, but with much praising of Bacchus). These core languages are C, Smalltalk and Perl. The latter, not so much because it is based on Lisp, awk, bsh and c, but because it took me a while before I could automatically handle its 'reversed' logic. Selecting a language that has a future is therefore an important career decision, although sometimes not the right business decision (e.g. my learning time for Ruby was minimal, due to my Perl experience).

I don't know how much of Ruby is carried into Rails as learning Rails is still on my todo list. However I do like the 'scaffolding' (code frameworks) it uses and rapid development platforms are always welcome if they only have reasonable overheads.

For the record - here are some of my past and present acquaintances:-
TASB/C, Ass8m, Macro 11, B, Fortran, COBOL, Gem, Mumps, BASIC, Ratfor, C, Pascal, Lisp, Actor, Small Talk, Rexx, ALGOL, JS, Java, VB. C++, Dylan, Perl, PHP, Ruby (and ix stuff like YACC)
Some were loved, others hated.

Regards
'Grandad'

[flesso]

Originally Posted by D.TC

Regards
'Grandad'

Lol, I think you took what I said the wrong way. What I meant by 'Grandad Language' was that it was one of those languages which has been around for years and years...

[D.TC]

Originally Posted by flesso

Lol, I think you took what I said the wrong way. What I meant by 'Grandad Language' was that it was one of those languages which has been around for years and years...

No offense Josh - I knew what you meant. I guess what I was saying is that Ruby's DNA is good as it comes from Perl and Smalltalk - though I would think of Perl as a dad rather than grandad.

Perl did not become popular with large companies (in things like content management) until the late 1990's, and it's real expansion was in he early 2000's. 7/8 years is a long time in computing, but not so long with languages that take time to mature. OOP helps as does language applications being built with previous languages, (byte code -> assembler -> C -> Ruby -> Rails -> MyApplication), but there are still guys that have to spend huge amounts of time developing them and a long acceptance curve to follow.

Cheers
Dad