On 1-okt-2007, at 12:51, Marcin Raczkowski wrote:

> also I'm open to any arguments(preferable documented, with  
> showcases, and understandable by investor(who never had much  
> expirience with computers except for e-mail and www)) that would  
> help convince him that ruby is much better then php  :)

I have an argument, altough a weird one at that. PHP is all about  
Apache deployment and mod_php. It's _optimized_ for the situation  
whereby you have many
applications running on the same site and many of these applications  
might be sloppy. Because of that, PHP dedicates a majority of it's  
potential to sustain a
shared-nothing architecture where the virtual machine gets  
reinitialized on every request etc. This is a total win for shared  
hosting and fast and dirty deployment on shareds,
but this strength is not applicable to high-volume deployment (on VPS  
or dedicated - which is I supposed is your deployment scenario for  
this scale).

In any _other_ area than deployment with maximum security of  
_developers_ from each and _raw speed_ PHP looses to Ruby. The  
following arguments are boilerplate that I usually put on the
table when the question 'Why Ruby arises':

a) the obscurity of the language gives much higher guarantees of  
library quality (both in implementation and style). All Ruby libs I  
came to use in the last few years have been remarkably elegant.
b) the fact that Ruby is currently on the edge of Agile interests  
(there are just more metodologies that get tested in Ruby-land as  
opposed to PHP)
c) any developer with a level of OOP experience can pick up Ruby  
remarkably easily (this does not apply to troglodyte bold types who  
want their "for" loop and don't give a damn about design)
d) most Ruby developers favor "clean" in place of "fast and dirty"
e) if you got the hardware the deployment is actually much more  
streamlined than for PHP projects (with tools like cap and vlad)
f)  all C-aware developers that I know admitted that writing Ruby  
extensions in C is a breeze, if you need it
g) there is quite some development going on in the alternative  
interpreter scene (with projects like JRuby, Rubinius etc)

Basically there are two, and only two situations where I would either  
drop the project because it needs PHP or write it in PHP klinging:
a) you want ubiqutous deployment options - you want to distribute the  
script that the user can install on a shared hosting platform where  
he's even disallowed from doing a database dump
(not your case)
b) you need to bind to Win-only API's or deploy on Win

That's one of the best articles I know of on "slow versus fast" argument
http://plasmasturm.org/log/443/

-- 
Julian 'Julik' Tarkhanov
please send all personal mail to
me at julik.nl