Switching to Rails

I’ve been working on a personal project based on CodeIgniter and it’s been uphill work. I finally lost patience with both the framework and language and followed the advice given on my last post about code testing.

I’ve used Ruby for scripting, and deploying PHP applications with custom Capistrano recipes for years now, but I’ve never tried any of the available web frameworks.

This week I switched to Ruby on Rails, and I’ve accomplished more in a couple of days than in a couple of months with CodeIgniter.

I’m not trying to claim that there’s anything fundamentally wrong with PHP, so don’t beat me up over it, but I find working with Ruby and Java much more intuitive, enjoyable and productive: it’s a personal choice, I feel more inspired.

I’m particularly loving the default support for unit, functional and integration testing; I now feel in control of my code and I’ve yet to explore the full range of testing frameworks and approaches available for Rails.

I know that CakePHP mirrors Rails functionality very closely, but I’m afraid it’s the PHP language that I find too ugly to love – personal choice again, don’t shoot – consequently this is one developer who may have written his last line of PHP code…… maybe.

I’m now hoping to have the first release of the nature and wildlife recording application I’ve been promising Clare for…… much too long, up and running in the next couple of weeks.