I’ve worked with all of those languages. Java will get you a job, most likely one you’ll hate. PHP will get you a job that will probably be frustrating in the long term.

Ruby/Rails is really a dream. It’s not just the language, nor the framework. The Rails community is large and helpful, there are a ton of plugins and gems ready to use, and there are testing frameworks that are built-in. No crazy bugs to track down as testing is a real breeze.

I’ve written the large sprawling PHP app, and they rarely are tested in any way; with Rails everything is standardized and serene. I highly recommend it.

I picked up Ruby and Rails in a couple months of daily use. I was more comfortable with Ruby in that short of time span as I was with PHP after eight years.

MonkeyPatch-ing sounds interesting, but everything can be coded in many ways, some of them are better some not.

Last days (before I come to yours website) I was wondering what will be advantages of learning ruby and use rails insetad of cake.

One of my conclusions was that, there will not be any advantages for me.(comparing time spent on learning Ruby and Rails to financial result).

You are right – Ruby code is much more clear than php code, Ruby has good approach on OOP where php is just begining,but market for php coders is hudge right now, and market for Ruby coders is just growing. We can argue here, because of smaller number of Ruby coders , but only reason here is again smaller market for Ruby coders.

I saw few podcasts about Ruby, and you are right once again, Cake is only clone, but not pure clone, he is limited by php at all and version of php used by cake develpers.

Within few weeks I’m going to choose some new language to learn (probably it will be java, if not I will review my opinion about Ruby), than if I will choose Ruby, I will be often guest on your website, and If you woudn’t mind I will ask you hunderds of questions about R and RoR.

cheers.

Since you didn’t choose to leave an actual email, nor even your name, I’ll reply here.

There are a ton of ways having a String or an Integer is useful. One of these is extending classes at run time. I highly suggest you read up on Monkey Patching

You can even extend the Nil class to do some interesting stuff when a value is not found when you expected something.

Sure, you can write classes that have methods and inheritance and such, but PHP’s built-in functions are almost totally procedural. In Ruby ‘nil’ in an object, as is the number 1, or “String”. That is true OOP.

PHP’s built-in functions operate on variables, not on objects. Meaning that when you call something like “substr($string, 3)”; that is 100% procedural. A true OOP way would have the substr() function as a method of a string object, i.e. ”$string.substr(3)”.

Again, PHP is moving in the right direction, but I’m afraid that it would take basically a full language re-write before it is truly OOP.

Of course, that’s just my $0.02 ;)

PHP is object oriented! :-)

The actual problem is with PHP’s implementation of OOP.

So yes, PHP is object oriented, but there are people (including me) who would like to see an improvement in the OOP features. Personally seeing spaghetti code and pseudo OOP makes me ill. Stop with the spaghetti code already and really for a better OOP model in PHP. Seriously, coding procedurally or using pseudo-OOP is like trying to engineer a bridge with paper. OK, procedural programming was OK 20 years ago. Procedural programming Vs. OOP programming is like 17th century architecture Vs. 21st century architecture. Stop it.

http://www.objectorientedphp.com/

That said, CakePHP is a great thing for PHP. I see way to much PHP “hacked out” with no structure at all.

[1]: Doing PHP was a major hurdle, they wouldn’t even consider Ruby.

Thanks!