about php: " but its behavior is robust and predictable" ...
I beg to differ. PHP has big changes even in minor version upgrades. Just look at the Changelog. Total horror.
Rails doesn't use Databases for configuration. It especially encourages the use of YAML for this. So any configuration stuff should be and is flat file in Rails. Of course if you have custom configration on a per user basis, the database might be the better storage for that.
The database structure is delivered using a standard SQL Scheme. And the mapping to objects happens via naming conventions (or if you want you specify the table names in your object classes). So I don't really get what you mean by "By contrast, Rails seems to use the database itself as the primarily source of configuration information." - do you mean the convention that every column in the database table gets a standard accessor in the object without any code?
I agree on the deployment issue. If you run your own server from scratch, and have to compile everything, deploying rails isn't harder than PHP. But since PHP is delivered with most systems in a usable binary form nowadays, and widely available on most ISPs per default, deploying of PHP files is easier. Although there are the issues with the dumb configuration options like "magic_quotes" and stuff...
It's hard to comment on your comparison without having the possibility to look at DataCruxWeb - is it available publically?
by Dominik Wagner — Aug 23
I beg to differ. PHP has big changes even in minor version upgrades. Just look at the Changelog. Total horror.
Rails doesn't use Databases for configuration. It especially encourages the use of YAML for this. So any configuration stuff should be and is flat file in Rails. Of course if you have custom configration on a per user basis, the database might be the better storage for that.
The database structure is delivered using a standard SQL Scheme. And the mapping to objects happens via naming conventions (or if you want you specify the table names in your object classes). So I don't really get what you mean by "By contrast, Rails seems to use the database itself as the primarily source of configuration information." - do you mean the convention that every column in the database table gets a standard accessor in the object without any code?
I agree on the deployment issue. If you run your own server from scratch, and have to compile everything, deploying rails isn't harder than PHP. But since PHP is delivered with most systems in a usable binary form nowadays, and widely available on most ISPs per default, deploying of PHP files is easier. Although there are the issues with the dumb configuration options like "magic_quotes" and stuff...
It's hard to comment on your comparison without having the possibility to look at DataCruxWeb - is it available publically?