RoR community, please prove me wrong.  I would love to love Ruby on Rails.  It seems like it’s so easy and fun. Just type some quick commands, and an extensive web application is born!

It seems this easy from the documentation and tutorials, but I know better. I am a PHP developer and the thing I love about my language is that it is customizable, expandable, and scalable. While it may take a little more development time, it saves so much more effort in the long run.

My inspiration for this post may be obvious, but it’s something that has bothered me since first using the service.  Twitter seems like a simple application.  I have built more complex applications with PHP in under a week and feel like I could build this whole site in less than that.  It is hard to believe that there is over $100 million in funding for a system that lags and/or fails most of the time I am using it.

One thing RoR has over most languages, however, is rapid development.  A knowledgeable RoR developer could easily and quickly build a fully functioning prototype application.  But successful systems often rely on a userbase.  Too many users and data on a RoR system can bring it to a halt as quickly as it was built.

Again, I’m a PHP developer who typically uses the Zend Framework, and my lack of experience and knowledge for Rails may have given me a bad view of Rails, but from the applications I’ve seen versus the PHP applications I’ve seen makes me feel like my view isn’t too far off.