Comments on: Ruby on Rails or Zend Framework – deciding now!

By: Keil

Keil — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 21:49:22 +0000

Hi,

There goes the bad guy (me).

I usually use ZF, but i wanted to know if RoR is worth a try.
I am not in love with ZF, but I do not hate it.

And as for RoR, I am still not convinced.

It everywhere the same thing, no one give a right justified bad experience.

So, there is the question:
How hard is it to find a solution to a problem with both ZF and RoR?

RoR and ZF docs suck. I am clearly a Java hater, but their javadoc is more than OK.

While looking for information, especially when I am at work, I do not want a asynchronous discussion in order to find a way to solve something, so posting to a forum at that time is out of question. I want to find the solution in the doc, or at least in a forum.
When that is not possible, I look into the code.

The ZF code is a labirynth that the F3 key in eclipse IDE cannot always solve (abstract classes oh get damn).
The ZF class are sometimes illogic: XXX.php is an abstract class as well as the YYY/Abstract.php
Anyway, sometimes it get on my nerve, and from what I have heard, some ZF functionnalities are undocumented (or very-little-documented) on purpose just to make a company request (and pay for) a ZF expert.

By the way, if ZF Core members are reading this. I often use the Zend_Soap_Server class, which is a big useful wrapper around the PHP SoapServer class. I think your are aware of the following case:
When in a method, you expect a parameter to be a set, if the client send just a set with one item, the structure will be different of if a set of multiple items was sent. (I was on ZF 1.8 at that time).

I know a lot of con to ZF, but it is a useful framework. I just have to apply some skills to “patch” for this, sometime I have to dig up the ZF source code.

If RoR has too a lot of con while debugging, maybe it won’t be a framework for me.
(I already hate the magic tools that create code or sql in your place. But ZF has it own magic too: auto-loading, application.ini, … I just adapt myself)

Sorry if this post was aggressive, but i long to know the cons to RoR.

Thx

By: Bragaadeesh

Bragaadeesh — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 21:03:40 +0000

RoR rocks!!

By: Stefan

Stefan — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 14:19:11 +0000

Thank you very much for this, I will have to consider all this before I start my next big project.

Just as a follow up, does anyone know if the more recent releases, (zend 1.11 and Ruby 3.0.3 at the time of writing this) change any of the origianl points here?

Thanks everyone!

By: Igorek

Igorek — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 21:34:55 +0000

Wonderful post!
I’ve been using ZF for few years not and have done a fair chunk of RoR development prior. I agree with dp10, learning Zend may look difficult at the beginning, because you don’t know where to start. That is the only negative aspect, since there are very little tutorials that will get you 0-60 before you can easily read online documentation and understand whats going on.
I wish ZF team could address this in the future for all “new” developers switching to their framework. I spent about 2 weeks learning this 2 years ago, painful weeks. But now I absolutely love the framework and would not deffer from it.
Keep doing a wonderful job and Zend guys!

P.S. about the scalability and speed, we are running 2 enterprise level solutions on ZF. It really makes things look good.

By: dp10

dp10 — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 13:34:48 +0000

Great discussion. I used to be a developer but moved on to the operations side but now I’m back programming. Recently I spent some time learning Ruby and once I got past the magic part I found the language elegant and powerful. I still struggle with learning the underlying classes. Additionally, I found it difficult to find hosting (6 months ago), so I’ve been checking out Zend. From my perspective Zend is difficult to learn as they hide all their learning tools. It appears to me that Zend is all about making money now. Ruby has many many great free tutorials to get started (zend has one with piss poor examples (no mysql)).

What I really want to know is which is faster? I felt like Ruby was dragging as my application got bigger. Twitter has moved on so they are frustrated with speed as well.

Zend shows very poorly on the benchmark tests that I’ve found which makes me consider CodeIgniter but that framework lacks an ORM which is important to my upcoming project.

Anyone want to chime in on speed and scalability?

By: John

John — Fri, 08 May 2009 23:45:18 +0000

I’d go with the Zend Framework. RoR is excellent, but with PHP you essentially have 8 or so years of it being the number one web scripting language, and massive support has been built up in that time with the number of libraries, and books etc. dwarfing Ruby. PHP is really not any more “difficult” than Ruby… in fact PHP caught on because it is rather simple. As the poster above states RoR is avery opinionated framework. The ZF is far more flexible in that regard. It really depends on what you want to do, but overall for my purposes the speed of implementation with the ZF is actually quicker.

By: Phil

Phil — Sun, 03 May 2009 06:38:10 +0000

Wow. I am very glad I came across this. This has got to be the most sensible discussion (between the blogger and the ZF team) over web application frameworks and technologies that I have ever seen.

I use ZF heavily because it fits my style of development. I do not like opinionated frameworks. I simply want a tool box that lets me use as much or as little as possible. I prefer to code rather than have code generated OR to configure pieces together via XML. For me ZF allows me to have my preference while greatly accelerating my development. RoR just doesn’t quite fit my style but thats not to say its not great for the next guy.

I actually ended up here because I was going to try one last time to find some sensible discussion on this topic. I also do some Java development and have often wished Java could be as powerfully dynamic as PHP and then I discovered Groovy. My interest in Groovy led me to Grails (Rails for Groovy) but as I said I’m more of a fan of the ZF style of framework. I wanted to one last time get some comparison and contrast on ZF and Rails to see if Grails may be a fit for me or if Groovy would be capable of handling a port of some of my most commonly used ZF components if not the entire framework. Honestly I’d love to combine Groovy/Java a port of ZF and PHP via Quercus into my ultimate toolbox for web application development. IMO this would make for an EXTREMELY powerful platform and toolset.

By: Christian Lupp

Christian Lupp — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 05:39:23 +0000

@lion21: if you compare the percentage of shared hosts providing RoR support with those who provide php support … you are right – there are more shared hosters with php support. But don’t ask them for support for the zend framework And yes, there are many great php based web apps like WordPress, written in php – and it is quite easy to put them on your server and use them. But that is not what Ruby on Rails is designed for. RoR is tailored for developers who create new web applications. And here the elegance of the programming language Ruby and the clever designed RoR framework work perfectly together to provide a tool for developers to realize great and maintainable apps in a short timeframe. I absolutely disagree with you that Ruby and Ruby on Rails are hard to learn for devs … looks like you never tried it. And I only can recommend that you tryout RoR. I don’t have to convince anybody whether php/zend framework or Ruby on Rails is better. If you’re not sure – give both a try.
BTW shared hosting support for Ruby on Rails is getting better and better these days, thanks to the Phusion Passenger solution aka mod_rails – it’s built on the Apache webserver and deployment of Rails apps is only a matter of uploading files – so no RoR specific server configuration required for running Ror apps.

By: lion21

lion21 — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 18:37:55 +0000

many shared host do not provide ROR support , also there are few web applications as compared to php + zend is not the only framework in php to work with , but Ruby has got only one , so no choice there ,ruby is not as fast as php, no support for procedural approch makes the learning curve steep + difficult for classy programmers,
It wd be safe to say ROR was a good compitior but now in 2009 php has emereged as winner , univarsially accepted server side scripting language.

By: Bruno Buccolo

Bruno Buccolo — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 19:45:43 +0000

Hey Blogger,

It’s been a while since I saw a “non-religious” aproach to a language decision.
While showing your view, you kept a clear prespective of the scene.
Conviced us, readers, that you’ve explored it well and for that particular case, the best option is RoR.
Congrats for this beautiful post.

Thanks!