Over the past few years I’ve begun using an increased number of open source web frameworks in my development projects. Where I used to code everything from scratch, I now depend on these frameworks to build with. Most recently, Ruby on Rails has garnered my attention and I have committed myself to learning it. After 10 years of writing mostly procedural PHP code (followed by 2 years of OOP PHP) ... I feel I am finally in Programmer’s heaven.

Its been a very intense month since I first started learning Rails. I originally purchased 5 or so books to help me study, some on Ruby, some on Rails. (that’s about average for topics I become obsessed with) I’ve only actually read 3 of them so far, but my knowledge is expanding at a decent pace. Rails thus far has been everything I had hoped it would be and rightly deserves the attention it gets. It has been an utter joy to use. But more than this ... the underlying language, Ruby, is what puts a smile on my face. I confess, there are times when I look at ruby code and forget that its code at all. Its just so ... elegant and readable.

I’ve built PHP programs for about 10 years now, and ColdFusion programs for roughly 3 years before that. My first framework, FuseBox, served me well and taught me to organize my thoughts better in both of those languages. More recently though, I began using CodeIgniter, an MCV based framework for PHP. CodeIgniter was just what I needed for a while, but I eventually began to see it as incomplete. It lacked some functionality that was important to me, so I began looking around.

Two of PHP’s flagship frameworks are Zend and CakePHP. I looked into both of these briefly though neither one really satisfied my interest. Well, to be honest, I actually liked Zend. It had great documentation and a nice modular approach. I built a small app, nothing special but it worked. CakePHP on the other hand had horrible documentation and I quickly lost interest. Two frameworks behind me, something still wasn’t right. I eventually realized that I was simply unhappy with PHP itself. After 10 years of programming in PHP, I still have to look at the manual to find proper functions names ... chaos, and time for a new chapter. RoR here I come ...

Looking forward, I don’t presume that Ruby or the Rails framework will be perfect. I imagine there may even be some things which I could do easier in PHP ... for a while at least. I’ll still be using PHP for one of my two jobs so I won’t be dropping it completely . But clearly, I can’t wait to dive into Ruby on Rails

I hope to post a few thoughts as I go, perhaps comparing PHP/CodeIgniter to Ruby/Rails. I know the two aren’t really in the same league, but I imagine others could be making the same journey that I am. For now though, I think my next post will be on what specifically I like most about Ruby. It has some very interesting language constructs.