PHP developers migrating to RoR - Universal trend?

"I bet most people who use/used PHP got there because it was popular"

This is fairly accurate, but not quite the whole story.

Ascribing PHP's success to "popularity" makes it sound like a simple fashion statement. The reality is that, due to its popularity, PHP has a ton of libraries and an enormous base of existing code (ranging from little hacks to parse a certain data format all the way up to full-blown applications like MediaWiki). It's not just the language, it's the ecosystem.

That's a real advantage that's often overlooked by those who advocate other languages. Also, don't forget that PHP hosting is cheap and ubiquitous. Rails, not so much.

That said, Ruby is catching up pretty fast, and I've been using Ruby (and sometimes Rails) for any new project that isn't tightly coupled with existing code. For me, writing Ruby is vastly more pleasant and efficient than writing PHP, even though I've been using PHP for five years and Ruby for only one.

I still write a lot of Java, too, but JRuby is starting to eat into that pretty fast. It's an end run around the library/existing code problem.

This post is not current, sorry about that! But its fairly current to extrapolate the statistic.

What is the current trend, when it comes to the most preferred development framework? I am sure the open source community has marched forward since Oct 2006.

I hope that PHP developers would realize that PHP is atrocious and just run away from PHP. RoR is pretty popular right now, so I'm sure a bunch would land on RoR, and it'd be a serious upgrade. :-) I bet most people who use/used PHP got there because it was popular, and not because they compared the relative merits of the languages.

This post is definitely old. Anyway, I've never really done any serious PHP (I'm a Ruby/Rails hacker), but for those that have, have any of you checked out Code Igniter (http://codeigniter.com)? Opinions? On the surface it looks very similar to RoR.

Well, yeah, of course people using a popular open-source web platform are going to be the ones interested in a different open-source web platform.

Now if VB programmers started switching, that'd be something.

I'm curious, how long does a migration take? As in, being reasonably familiar with another language, you decide to port to or program in a different language, which you have little prior exposure to.

By the end of this year, a lot of shared hosting providers should be upgrading to CPanel 11, which has the same built-in support for Ruby as it does for PHP.