Man do i wish i could get some more coding done. I got to spend a couple hours on it last week sunday. Since then, nothing really. It makes me feel bad that my program/script is not done. It was one of the few I really pushed into the class system too. Here comes my looking into Ruby on Rails and PHP
As people can probably tell from my amount of PHP scripts, I am far more versed in php than RoR. I admit this now because I cannot really compare them too much without learning a lot more about RoR. I also should remind those who don’t know that I’m a ZCE (means PHP certified). So I will try to not be completely biased towards php.
As I expressed at first, I like classes. I think that OOP is the greatest way to program when done right. Short scripts for php do not need OOP. When implementing and organizing classes for a script to do one thing takes up more room than writing it out in spoken language and procedurally, I find it hard to argue for OOP. If you want reusable code, though, you really should set up your classes. It is worth it even in PHP 4. 5 makes it substantially better for OOP, but isn’t needed.
RoR is all classes and all in the “Controller Module View” paradigm. (Not sure if i got those in the right order…). For those not familiar with it, it generally means you set up your Modules to connect to the data and fetch or store it, your controller to actually deal with the processing of the request to request the data and usually to manipulate it if needed (manipulate as in parse, multiply, etc.), and then the views to actually display it. It is arguably the best paradigm in programming. I love it since it is so clean and organized. I usually implement it in various forms in all of my larger projects. Yes, php fully supports it. I can’t stress enough that just because RoR tries to require it and php doesn’t does not mean that they are set in their ways.
PHP, honestly, seems too nice to people at times. You can really put together some crappy code and end up with a working project. Updating and reusing is a nightmare and a half, but it can technically be done. RoR tires to force better practices while not making it difficult. I really respect this idea.
Though not as great of support yet, RoR might be my language/framework of choice (it’s not a language itself. Ruby is the language. Rails is strictly a framework, but a damn nice one and a damn clean one). I wonder if i could implement Xapian (search database) into it… then i could have a RoR movie database with enhanced searching. RoR and Flash. i need to read… I need time