I am in the process of trying to get a site developed by a programmer.
I’ve had many offers to program the site, and one particular programmer
wants to do the backend in Ruby on Rails. I initially wanted the site to
be developed in PHP/MySQL, as it seemed to make the most sense for this
kind of site. But I know nothing about Ruby. Are there any drawbacks to
using Ruby? Is there anything I should know about?
I am in the process of trying to get a site developed by a programmer.
I’ve had many offers to program the site, and one particular programmer
wants to do the backend in Ruby on Rails. I initially wanted the site to
be developed in PHP/MySQL, as it seemed to make the most sense for this
kind of site. But I know nothing about Ruby. Are there any drawbacks to
using Ruby? Is there anything I should know about?
Only pick a programmer who agrees to write unit tests for each
feature. That technique improves quality, and makes the bug rate
almost non-existent.
Next, Rails also uses MySQL too, so that’s not a factor. (However,
Rails makes switching to any other database spectacularly easy, but
that’s usually not very important.)
Next, pick the programmer who wants to use the language that typically
requires less code to implement more features. Ruby almost always
requires less code.
So if your developer agrees to write unit tests, you should see well
more than twice the productivity that you are familiar with.
Compared to PHP, Ruby has no drawbacks that I can think of.
Phlip underestimates the improvement in productivity that you can
expect usig RoR versus other platforms, from my experience. I easily
achieved twice the productivity while still working my way through the
book’s examples. Literally days of work were completed in hours.
I wouldn’t make a decision based on the language the programmer wants to
use (although RoR would be a good choice for many situations), but I’d
rather choose the programmer that produces the highest quality of work.
If the best programmer you can find works in PHP, then go with that. A
poor programmer will produce poor code no matter what language they’re
working in, even if RoR mitigates the chances of that to some extent.
nic.
Guest wrote:
Hi -
I am in the process of trying to get a site developed by a programmer.
I’ve had many offers to program the site, and one particular programmer
wants to do the backend in Ruby on Rails. I initially wanted the site to
be developed in PHP/MySQL, as it seemed to make the most sense for this
kind of site. But I know nothing about Ruby. Are there any drawbacks to
using Ruby? Is there anything I should know about?
Thanks.
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