Man, where do I start. Well I’ve come to the realization that many others have and that is that Ruby just doesn’t scale as easily as other available languages nor does it have the polished feel of something like Java or C. Sure, it is much faster to develop with, when you’re not debugging that is. For someone that wants a fast, out of the box framework well wired to object oriented database hooks and MVC it is the way to go, though doing really custom things can be fairly obscure. Over the last few days I’ve been using RMagick lots and it’s been quite frustrating to have things hang where I should be getting error messages.
Long story short, I continue Ruby with my work on AIM Photos at AOL, however my personal stuff I’m moving to PHP with an equivalent rails framework. Two likely candidates are trax and symfony.
During my evaluations I read a great quote by another developer switching back to PHP, he said, “PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES ARE LIKE GIRLFRIENDS: THE NEW ONE IS BETTER BECAUSE *YOU* ARE BETTER.” How true are both of those statements. The basic point is that you learn so much from the past relationship that you come better prepared for the next one.
If Java was more supported by shared hosts, I’d jump back on the Struts boat, though for my personal work, PHP should do fine. Now I need to switch from Netbeans back to Eclipse, and dreamhost back to 1and1, oh joy
Similar to a new GF, who brings her own baggage and family, you need to accept and try for a successful integration.