Member Avatar for uaecasher

hello, I'm currently a PHP developer and I'm looking to learn new languages, what i found a good chose is ruby on rails. from what i came to know that ruby is much easier and fast way to develop web apps and uses techniques like MVC and DRY. however is ruby on rails as powerful as PHP?

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As asked whether Rails is "as powerful as PHP": yes — Rails is fully capable of powering large, production-grade sites. Real-world, high‑traffic services have used Rails in core parts of their stack (for example, GitHub, Shopify, Basecamp, GitLab), and Discourse is a modern, open-source forum built on Rails, so forum and social features are well within Rails' reach. PHP also powers many mature commercial packages, so "power" comes down to ecosystem fit, not raw capability.

As noted, developer familiarity matters more than the language. As observed, Ruby web work is usually Rails-centric, which gives a consistent learning path. PHP offers multiple mature frameworks today (Symfony, Laravel, Zend, etc.), so choose based on team skills, library availability, and long-term maintenance rather than hype.

Operationally, Rails and PHP differ in hosting expectations and resource profile. Rails processes typically use more memory per worker, so Rails apps are commonly run on VPS/PaaS or cloud instances behind Nginx with Puma or Passenger, while PHP apps can often be served cheaply on shared hosts via PHP-FPM. Both can scale: use caching, CDNs, background job systems (Sidekiq/Resque for Ruby; equivalent queues for PHP), database tuning, and service decomposition to handle load.

Practical next steps: implement a small real feature (a CRUD page or simple forum) in the stack you want to compare, deploy it to a low-cost VPS or PaaS, and measure development speed, deployment complexity, hosting cost, and maintainability. If learning Rails, start with core Ruby, the official Rails Guides, then read an open-source production app (Discourse or GitLab) to see common patterns in authentication, background processing, and moderation.

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Member Avatar for blocblue

I've worked as a PHP developer, and have since started a new job where most development is done on RoR.

From what I have experienced, RoR is so much faster than PHP. However, I'm not sure it is a fair comparison, because RoR is a framework using the Ruby language, whereas PHP is a programming language only.

Member Avatar for uaecasher

what about ruby on rails vs php frameworks e.g (phpcake and zend)

the other thing i want to is can RoR make powerful website like for example facebook or good forum software such as vBulletin?

Member Avatar for blocblue

RoR can put together a blog, with front end display pages, back end CMS, secure login, images, etc, etc in under 30 mins from scratch.

But with any framework; its only as quick as the developer, and familiarity is everything. Ruby is a very nice programming language to work with... well I think it is. It just takes a little getting used to going from PHP to Ruby.

Member Avatar for digital-ether

The good thing about Rails is that you don't have a to choose a framework. If you are developing websites with Ruby, you most likely are using Rails.

With PHP there are too many frameworks, too many clones of RoR. The development curves are two high between frameworks. The PHP versions, requirements are too far apart between frameworks etc.

The Zend framework is doing for PHP what Rails did for web based development in Ruby to some extent. But it isn't accepted as the "only" php web development framework like RoR is for Ruby.

However, this also means that you only have one choice of Framework in Ruby. So if there is something you don't like about it, you are out of luck.

Member Avatar for digital-ether

RoR can put together a blog, with front end display pages, back end CMS, secure login, images, etc, etc in under 30 mins from scratch.

You can do the same with a PHP framework if you know it well.

Member Avatar for blocblue

You can do the same with a PHP framework if you know it well.

Hence my second paragraph :)

But with any framework; its only as quick as the developer, and familiarity is everything. Ruby is a very nice programming language to work with... well I think it is. It just takes a little getting used to going from PHP to Ruby.

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