The Nashville Tech Story (10/2/2009)
Tech Entrepreneur Series: Your First Critical Decision: PHP, .Net or Ruby on Rails
The Nashville Technology Council held the second series of our entrepreneur series last night at the Cool Springs Life Sciences Center. The session was moderated by Kate O’Neill, founder of MetaMarketer. Panelists Nicholas Holland, centre{source}; Chris McPherson, Firefly Logic; and Yossef Mendelssohn, OG Consulting debated the decision to use one of three platforms: PHP, .NET or Ruby on Rails.
They began by discussing Rails and debunking a common myth surrounding the platform. A myth about Ruby on Rails is that it has the perception of being easy to use, but it is not scalable because of recent service issues at Twitter, the largest site on Rails according to Alex Payne, a developer at Twitter. “The issue is developers can only achieve 95 percent of enterprise scalability, but will typically need a boost from some other languages to achieve the final 5% for their application,” said Mendelssohn. He continued to challenge the myth by saying the developers that experience this type of problem are those that just do not have the experience necessary to solve and work around these types of issues. To learn more about Rails myths click here.
Rails uses the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture pattern to organize application programming. Ruby is the programming the language. Mendelssohn also discussed some versions of the Rails platform that included Merb (being rolled into Rails 3) and Sinatra (not a MVC architecture, but a DSL – Domain Specific Language) that are gaining traction.
Holland argued that the issue with utilizing Rails as an entrepreneur could be a mistake because of expense. He continued by saying that Rails developers are highly demanded, but the supply of good Rails developers is low, which in turn can lead to extremely high costs. .Net, largely still an enterprise solution, can come with the same high cost, but has also taken a few shots over the years. Holland said “PHP has become the working man’s programming language. It is not as sexy, but it works.”
As an entrepreneur just starting out, the goal is to create a website that is hip and trendy and will grab the client’s attention. McPherson made the group aware that .Net continues to receive the misconception that it is incapable of producing an appealing website. If you hire a developer that is very knowledgeable about .Net, anything is possible, but like Rails, development can come at a high cost. McPherson pointed out that software developers who have a rich history of C# will be able to leverage the new developments from Microsoft into the web framework. Bryan Huddleston, Territory Manager for Microsoft, said, “Windows 7 will be released on October 22, 2009, and Windows will be available on more devices.” In addition, entrepreneurs should check out the BizSpark program.
Nicholas Holland asked, “Do you know what platform your mobile phone uses?” This was one of the more important questions of the night posed by the panelist, as it could impact millions of platform and development choices for years to come. So do you know?
Of the three platforms (.net, php, and rails), Holland believes PHP is the way to go because a great PHP developer can hang with a .Net or Rails developer for a lesser cost. The reason why we continue to depend heavily on PHP is specifically because it has a great deal of strength in the web development world. While it may not be the friendliest language amongst the three platforms, most developers started to shy away from PHP because they were trying to find ways to be more efficient and work faster. PHP, however, is a language that is not taught in schools and most developers with a PHP background have trained themselves on the language through sheer curiosity.
While we find that all of these platforms have something special to offer, each of them has advantages and reasons why they should or should not be chosen when starting a business. While .NET and Rails are frameworks, .NET has fewer advanced techniques on the Web side. At this point with Symfony in play, neither does Rails. Ruby as a language however, does have more advanced object oriented features than PHP.
Marcus Whitney, CTO of Moontoast and leader of the Enterprise LAMP Summit and Camp on November 5-7, 2009, in Nashville, TN, asked for each panelist “to give your development philosophy with regard to the platform.” The answers varied dramatically with Chris and the .Net faithful having the clearest philosophical vision. Nicholas brought laughter to the audience with his comments about “I know most of you are going to say that is heresy and the devil” when describing his philosophy.
Other tools and add-ons in the discussion included: Expression Engine, JavaScript, Code Igniter and .Net MVC, the next generation framework for web development.
Join us for our third roundtable in the Entrepreneurial Series: Protecting Your IP on November 5, 2009.
