Comments on: It had to happen. http://www.laurathomson.com/2007/03/it-had-to-happen/ Laura Thomson's random thoughts and rants about tech and FOSS Tue, 6 Jan 2009 01:49:23 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5 By: maxor http://www.laurathomson.com/2007/03/it-had-to-happen/#comment-90 maxor Wed, 11 Apr 2007 08:10:02 +0000 http://www.laurathomson.com/?p=90#comment-90 First off I'm a PHP developer in that I'm paid to write PHP. I've been getting more and more into rails and ruby in general. I've noticed that a lot of the stuff I missed about PHP at first were just bad habits and crutches. I too was scared about the debugging problem. I was so used to writing some code, testing it in the browser, debugging, testing in the browser... rinse repeat. Then I realized how easy it was to use test driven development, it's baked right into rails and I rarely worry about "debugging". As far as the documentation and community support goes I've found that while there isn't as much volume (compared to PHP) the quality is much better. I've never liked the community code snippets in the PHP manual, a lot are out of date and many of them display all of the bad ways one can write PHP. I've read the same Agile book a few times and I've never noticed anything specific about Java developers, not sure where you got that. In the end, I've found that RoR apps are easier to develop, are easier to be agile with, easier to test and in my experience take much less time to "ship" compared to the way I would do things in PHP. Plus Ruby is such a wonderful language! After I spend all day slugging through PHP I can't wait to get home and work on a Rails project. First off I’m a PHP developer in that I’m paid to write PHP. I’ve been getting more and more into rails and ruby in general. I’ve noticed that a lot of the stuff I missed about PHP at first were just bad habits and crutches. I too was scared about the debugging problem. I was so used to writing some code, testing it in the browser, debugging, testing in the browser… rinse repeat. Then I realized how easy it was to use test driven development, it’s baked right into rails and I rarely worry about “debugging”.

As far as the documentation and community support goes I’ve found that while there isn’t as much volume (compared to PHP) the quality is much better. I’ve never liked the community code snippets in the PHP manual, a lot are out of date and many of them display all of the bad ways one can write PHP. I’ve read the same Agile book a few times and I’ve never noticed anything specific about Java developers, not sure where you got that.

In the end, I’ve found that RoR apps are easier to develop, are easier to be agile with, easier to test and in my experience take much less time to “ship” compared to the way I would do things in PHP. Plus Ruby is such a wonderful language! After I spend all day slugging through PHP I can’t wait to get home and work on a Rails project.

]]> By: DJB http://www.laurathomson.com/2007/03/it-had-to-happen/#comment-89 DJB Tue, 03 Apr 2007 21:09:21 +0000 http://www.laurathomson.com/?p=90#comment-89 I'd love to know what build and configuration issues you hit on Solaris 10. I've hit some in the past, but nothing lately, and I run Solaris 10 + Sun Studio 11 here at work (next to my Windows box). Please submit these issues to either ruby-talk or ruby-core! Thanks, Dan I’d love to know what build and configuration issues you hit on Solaris 10. I’ve hit some in the past, but nothing lately, and I run Solaris 10 + Sun Studio 11 here at work (next to my Windows box).

Please submit these issues to either ruby-talk or ruby-core!

Thanks,

Dan

]]> By: Ed Finkler http://www.laurathomson.com/2007/03/it-had-to-happen/#comment-88 Ed Finkler Mon, 02 Apr 2007 22:21:50 +0000 http://www.laurathomson.com/?p=90#comment-88 What you mentioned about issues with Solaris reminds me of something that's bitten us in the ass many times: a lot of OSS devs seem to think UNIX == Linux, and make lots of assumptions about the Linux-ness of your OS. This is infuriating when you have not only a non-Linux UNIX, but are installing things in nonstandard dirs (I bet you thought that --prefix setting meant something, but not to MySQL 4! Ho ho ho!). Add in wanting to use the Sun dev tools instead of GNU, and it's kind of a clusterfuck. More recently we've been running Gentoo on our internet app boxes, so this has been less of an issue, but Solaris 10 is tempting us, as is the idea of Sun continuing to sponsor us. The Sun Coolstack stuff looks like a step in the right direction: http://cooltools.sunsource.net/coolstack/ What you mentioned about issues with Solaris reminds me of something that’s bitten us in the ass many times: a lot of OSS devs seem to think UNIX == Linux, and make lots of assumptions about the Linux-ness of your OS. This is infuriating when you have not only a non-Linux UNIX, but are installing things in nonstandard dirs (I bet you thought that –prefix setting meant something, but not to MySQL 4! Ho ho ho!). Add in wanting to use the Sun dev tools instead of GNU, and it’s kind of a clusterfuck.

More recently we’ve been running Gentoo on our internet app boxes, so this has been less of an issue, but Solaris 10 is tempting us, as is the idea of Sun continuing to sponsor us. The Sun Coolstack stuff looks like a step in the right direction: http://cooltools.sunsource.net/coolstack/

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