Rails or Laravel? | Hacker News Reader

Rails or Laravel?

2 pointsmatthewjames4 comments

Hello hackers!

I am currently a front-end dev with a good background in html5, css3, and of course js/jQuery. I have had previous experience with PHP a in the past making my own login systems for clients and doing simple DB requests, API requests, etc.

I am wanting to expand my programming knowledge-base and have started some of the basic intros into Ruby, and learning Ruby on Rails. Then I came across Laravel. I am wanting to brush up on these for some upcoming startup opportunities I will be having and have about six months of preparation time to learn.

From someone that has some prior experience in PHP already, what would be more beneficial (long term and short) to learn? Please respond with what choice and why you would make that choice.

Thanks in advance!

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Ruby on Rails. It's a little bit harder to learn that PHP, but if you question is "more beneficial"....totally Ruby on Rails.

I am biased, I will admit, but neither of the choices you presented is optimal. If I were you I would opt for Python/Django. Let me explain why.

PHP is in a terrible state, they are working on cleaning it up but it will take some time. You should not abandon PHP yet, but neither should you rely on it. Also PHP's scope of use is extremely limited. Laravel is quite good, but having worked with it for a while I feel it gets very messy.

RoR is good if you want to puzzle together CRUD applications. But if you want to make something other than CRUD it gets in the way far too often. I am sure more experienced RoR users will jump in and holler "you just haven't gotten used to it yet!" like they usually do. Might sound like I am bashing their community, but truth be told, they are very supportive if you choose to join their club.

Django is in my experience the best documented framework for web development. There are so many batteries included that you will be hard pressed to find something you need to do that it won't do out of the box. Being a Python framework it will run on most operating systems out of the box for development purposes as they come with Python built in. You can use Python for any type of development you want (Ruby can be used for any type as well, but have a lot more gotchas across environments)

Hi.

I'm developer who works with PHP for more than 12 years so far, and with Ruby/RoR for more than 2 years.

I would suggest you to stick to PHP to gain some experience, because Ruby/RoR programming requires some experience in order to not screw things up.

But Ruby gives you much more possibilities, however if you don't have experience and don't know what is best practice you can create a lot of junk code and chaos leading to serious problems (like your apps performance).

Cheers, Grzegorz

Hello,

I am web dev, and I work with PHP and RoR (for 2 months). My first impression is that Ruby allows better productivity and fun than PHP. In my case, PHP seemed easier to learn.

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