PHP vs Ruby which programming language is better for web development

PHP and ruby are trending scripting languages for the web servers as of today, Web development has became essential today as new business requires a new websites according to their needs and functionality.
All technologies thrive off the community, tooling, libraries and applications. As a business owner, you may want a technology that will last for many years beyond the project’s inception. As a developer, you want a technology that will stay around long enough, so you can get a return on investment. Business owners or developers will often base their decisions on their colleagues and community depending on which technologies are highly advocated. In this article we will go over the pros and cons of PHP as well as Ruby on Rails. We will touch on how PHP and Ruby on Rails compares with common topics such as scalability, maintenance, performance, costs, and support.

PHP: Most Popular Scripting Language for the Web

PHP (Hypertext PreProcessor) is a server scripting language designed by Rasmus Lerdorf, a powerful tool to create dynamic and interactive websites. It is fast, flexible, widely-used scripting language for everything from a simple blog to the most popular and dynamic websites in the world.
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Advantages of PHP

• Free software released under the PHP license
• Easy to learn (Short learning curve)
• Large community of users and developers
• Provides extensive database support
• Offers great number of available extensions and source codes
• Allows execution of code in restricted environments
• Offers native session management and extension API
• A great alternative for competitors like Microsoft’s ASP (Active Server Pages)
• Can be deployed on most web servers
• Works on almost every operating system and platform

Disadvantages of PHP

• Not suitable for making desktop applications
• Error handling is traditionally poor
• Global configuration parameters can change language semantics, complicating deployment and portability
• Objects are CallByValue by default, which is the opposite of most languages and catches lots of programmers off-guard
• Generally considered to be less secured than the other programming languages

Who Uses PHP?

• Zend
• Yahoo
• Facebook
• Google
• NASA
• W3C

Popularity

According to Wikipedia, as of January 2013, PHP was installed on more than 240 million websites (39% of those sampled) and 2.1 million web servers.

Syntax

A PHP script starts with < ?php and ends with ?> The default file extension for PHP files is “.php”. A PHP file usually contains HTML tags, and some PHP scripting code.

Ruby: Interpreted, Pure Object-Oriented Programming Language

Ruby (programming language) runs with Ruby on Rails or simply rails, an open source, full-stack web application framework. It is a dynamic, imperative object-oriented programming language developed by Yukihiro Matsumoto in Japan. It was influenced by Perl, Eiffel and Smalltalk. It a has dynamic type system and automatic memory management.

Advantages of Ruby

• Open-sourced
• Works on multiple platforms
• Can be embedded into Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
• A Very High-Level Language (VHLL)
• Offers encapsulation of data methods within objects
• Pure OOP (Object-Oriented Programming)
• Super advanced string and text manipulation techniques
• Can easily be connected to DB2, MySQL, Oracle, and Sybase
• Scalable and big programs written in Ruby are easily maintainable
• Has a clean and easy syntax that allows the new developer to learn Ruby very quickly and easily
• Ability to write multi-threaded applications with a simple API
• Offers advanced array class
• Able to write external libraries in Ruby or C
• Allows “reserved word” to be used as an identifier as long as the parser doesn’t perceive an ambiguity
• Better security features
• It has a debugger
• It has flexible syntax
• Powerful string handling

Disadvantages of Ruby

• Learning it can be difficult
• Lacks informational resources
• Slower processing time (CPU time) compared to other programming languages
• Development and updates are slower