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I often get asked about the benefits and downsides to various technologies that are popular for web applications. In this post, I wanted to take a look at three of the most popular languages/frameworks, .NET, Ruby, and PHP, and share the pros and cons of working with each one.
For simplicity's sake, I have broken my analysis up into four broad categories: Open Source/Enterprise, Ease of Use, Community Culture, and Robustness.
Open Source vs. Enterprise
.NET has many upsides to being an enterprise solution: it is a large, mature framework with multiple languages and stacks for many different types of applications. It is stable and fast due to it's JIT compiled performance. .NET also has great documentation which is more robust than other frameworks. It has ASP.NET, which is entirely open sourced, though it takes a small amount of extra work to prepare code for open sourcing.
Ruby is fully open-sourced, which means most of the Rails framework and gems are free (unless someone charges for a product or service they have built on top of the open-sourced code). It's easy to create component gems, which means you can often find a plug-and-play solution with a simple internet search. The downside to this is that Ruby and Rails are both changing rapidly, which means that it can be unstable from version to version. Upgrading can be a pain, and many developers experience multiple pieces of their application breaking with an upgrade, especially if they aren't using Bundler.
PHP is also open-sourced and has its own large community. It is primarily used for web development, and is the slowest of the three languages when looking at average run time for both object-oriented and functional programs. Similar to Ruby, PHP has easy availability of plugins and controls over internet.
Ease of Use
.NET has a GUI-centric development environment called Visual Studio. It's fairly easy to use and especially easy for developers who prefer a visual interface. The additional modules mean that a lot of code is already done for you, which makes it easy to create a robust application in a shorter amount of time.
Ruby is lightweight and command-line focused, which some developers prefer. Developers feel it's easier to get applications up and running with Rails because the framework is more flexible and deployment doesn't require running scripts. The language is concise and things often just work; however, because of this, it can be more difficult to debug or see where problems are in the code.
PHP is somewhere in-between the two. It follows a classic approach to programming and is very similar to C, which is an older language. It is not known for being as elegant as Ruby.
Community Culture
Although, .NET has the big Microsoft community, there is not as much open source development happening, and .NET is bound to Microsoft's timeline for projects and releases. But at the same time, Microsoft BizSpark offers a wonderful opportunity for startups to use Microsoft resources at no charge with free software and support and an entrepreneurial community called Biz Spark - http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/
Ruby has the Rails community, which is a vibrant and active developer community. Because there is a culture of open-sourcing, developers have much more control over the direction of the projects within the community. The sacrifice is that the community is changing fast and developers have to keep up with upgrades in order to not get left behind.
PHP has its own active community that is smaller than the .NET community but larger than the Ruby community. PHP is about four times as popular as Ruby according to the TIOBE Programming Community (as of December 2011). PHP is also talked about online twice as much as Ruby, according to the IEEE Spectrum popularity index.
Robustness
.NET is by far the most robust of the three languages. It uses a GUI-centric framework called Visual Studio, offers JIT compiled performance, supports multiple languages, and has great documentation. Furthermore, there is a huge community and lots of support offerings, both free for startups and packages for enterprise-level applications. It is a true enterprise solution.
Ruby, on the other hand, does not have the same robust features or support. Furthermore, Ruby is not the most scalable solution. Twitter, for example, launched using Ruby on Rails because it was fast to build, but then had to redo their application due to scalability issues (http://engineering.twitter.com/2011/04/twitter-search-is-now-3x-faster_1656.html). Also, Ruby is significantly slower than .NET, even when the code and hardware are optimized.
Where Ruby is a true programming language, PHP is a mix of a programming language and web framework. This means that you don't need to be full stack to build a robust program. Like in many of the other sections, PHP lies somewhere in-between Ruby and .NET for robustness.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are advantages and disadvantages to each of these languages and the choice you make depends on what you want and what you're goals are. In my opinion, if you are trying to come up with a barebones or skeleton prototype quickly, Ruby can help you get up and going. However, if you want to create something that can scale up, PHP and .NET are the way to go.
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Fuel Startup (http://www.fuelstartup.com) is a custom development agency, specializing in web, mobile and software applications for fast paced startup projects. Utilizing Fuel Methodology, we focuses on startup project success thru agility, risk management (taking surprises out of development), and cost savings. We also provide project management consultation to startups, mid size and fortune 500 companies.
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