Photo credit: Blue Sky on Rails by ecstaticist

So, in my very first blog post about OpenIndie, on my personal site kieranmasterton.com, I stated that I was going to be building the site in PHP, specifically, the Zend Framework. So why the sudden change of heart and will this impact upon our March 1st deadline?

To give you some background. I have been coding in PHP for almost 11 years. I started with Perl but quickly moved to PHP in 1998 when I learnt of its simplicity, ease of development and the growing support it had in the Open Source community. This shift from PHP to Rails I believe to be no different. I am by no means a puritan when it comes to languages. I know that some people become very attached to their language of choice and will defend it to a fault. However, I have always seen the language I use to serve a purpose. The right tool for the job etc. However, that isn’t to say that I’ve given Microsoft ASP.NET MVC framework even a cursory glance. Yes, I’m prejudice but you have to have some ideals and mine are Open Source through and through.

So, why Rails? Why not Django or something else? Simple. As I did with PHP I can see a natural movement growing. There is a community, a support mechanism which I have to say seems a lot less elitist - in my experience - than the PHP community, which all too often suffers from a superiority complex. I believe knowledge is for sharing and PHP developers are losing sight of this in my opinion. From a technical perspective, I have also been very impressed with both Ruby as a language and Rails as a framework. It is a pleasure to work with Ruby after dealing with a idiosyncratic and inconsistent language like PHP. Like PHP, Rails is Open Source - which, for us, is simply vital. Ruby is a pure OO language, while - lets be honest - PHP is faking it. PHP is, I’m afraid, flawed by design. All this isn’t to say that I don’t have a soft spot for PHP. It has served me well and there are still MANY instances where I would build something in a PHP framework (read Zend) over Rails. However, I think Rails is the right tool for the OpenIndie job.

I need to be agile, and given the crowdsourced, user-influenced nature of the site, I need to be flexible. Rails delivers. I need to build this thing quickly, quick to market, build new features, remove features, and maintain a DRY approach at all times. Rails delivers. I gave myself a week. A week of evenings and one weekend to play with Rails and decide if I was comfortable enough with the language and the framework to build OpenIndie in three months. And the outcome was a resounding, yes!

For anyone else looking to move from PHP to Rails, buy this book Rails for PHP Developers - you won’t regret it.

Kieran Masterton

OpenIndie Co-Founder