On 07/11/2007, John Joyce <dangerwillrobinsondanger / gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Nov 7, 2007, at 4:19 AM, Alex Young wrote:
>
> > Ilan Berci wrote:
> >> Please site an example where you found PHP easier than rails.
> > mv index.php ~/public_html
> >
> > Sorry, but it's true.  Deployment of PHP is trivial, deployment of
> > Ruby isn't.  That's one big reason why it's as popular as it is.
> >
> >
> If by deployment of php, you mean using php in web development is
> trivial, yes it's true.
> If by deployment of php, you mean installing and configuring a php
> interpreter is trivial, it is not true at all. It's quite a task.
> All Apache modules can be a pain.

However, PHP is already installed on many web hosting servers, The
number of admins capable of installing PHP (or having a test install
somewhere already) you see by just looking around in your IT
department is usually non-zero, not the same for Ruby.

There are also technical reasons for this. The mod_php has (after some
years of development) "sound security" (no more security holes than
the underlying POSIX). PHP has also a sound interpreter that you can
reset to the initial state which allows isolation of different
programs running in the apache workers, especially programs of
different users.

I guess once we get something like mod_ruby with similar level of
functionality as mod_php we could see it installed on some freewebs
(or cheapwebs at least) and people picking Ruby more often. Currently
you need dedicated hardware or equivelent to run a Ruby site which is
quite forbidding. Fixing this should be possible after 1.9.

Thanks

Michal