Developers have grown increasingly more interested in Ruby on Rails over the last year, and for good reason: the Rails movement has ushered in a new paradigm of agile web development that has allowed dozens of web 2.0 applications to launch in highly condensed time frames.

I’ve been wondering lately though: how realistic is the long term use of Rails going to be? For a development environment to be so tied to a relatively young server package as lighttpd compared to the de-facto standard of Apache is slightly concerning. Don’t get me wrong, I feel like Rails has kicked the web movement into high gear, and I’m incredibly impressed with what I’ve seen. Lately though, I’ve been reading more and more about PHP frameworks that aim to either port, or at least mimic the essential Rails functionality, and it’s quite intriguing.

My main point of contention is that PHP is first and foremost intended for use on the web: it’s a “Hypertext Preprocessor”, where Ruby is a more multipurpose programming language. Does that mean PHP will have strengths in the web arena that Ruby cannot match? Or does that mean that Ruby will be more versatile because it doesn’t focus on HTML?

I’m by no means an expert, but this is one of the big topics on my mind right now. If you’d like to do some further reading, here are a couple overviews of PHP framework packages:

10 Different PHP Frameworks | Rails-inspired PHP frameworks