Monday, 23 April 2007

Open Source Scaling Ruby on Rails and PHP

Nick Halstead over a new post in his blog discusses the open source scaling problem and how PHP scores over Rails when solving this problem.

One key element he mentions is that Rails does not allow you access to more than one database at a time. However, he says that this is only a problem if your database server is the bottleneck but there are enough instances where you need to split your requests between two database servers to get it fixed quickly.

The second and grave problem he lists is about high-level frameworks. He says, it is obvious that high-level languages give you faster development but slower execution and less flexibility to control bottlenecks.

He opines that when compared to the current problems that Rails is facing PHP is proving itself within a wide range of sectors including the commercial sector. Even though PHP is in its raw state and is slower to develop and more prone to bad coding. Zend Framework in PHP is minimising these ill-effects and is building a framework that is making development quicker, making way for better code practices.

He points out that the advantage of using a framework within PHP is that you still have the option to tweak at a lower level when you find a bottleneck. He gives the example of Zend_Cache in Zend Framework which allows you to cache chunks of data or sections of output or both which can be generated within a hierarchy of cached content. He states that another benefit is that if you are a commercial company you can switch the cache mechanism from its built in modules to cache within their own Zend Platform for enterprise level stability and performance.

Nick says that there are a lot of other PHP Frameworks like CakePHP, Prado, Symphony to name a few. He thinks that it is better to have one standard-bearer framework with which all can associate with PHP.