Hello Rails

Published 25 January 05 by Justin French, 22 comments

I have a great like-Rails-but-no-where-near-as-cool framework written in PHP, and I love it. I know it inside and out. It’s my baby. It helps me build web applications with speed and reliability.

The problem is that every time I want to extend it, I find myself writing some code that’s already been written in Rails. And let’s face it, Rails has momentum – whatever I do, there’s no way it can ever have the momentum or beauty of Rails… Rails has momentum and a thriving community, I have nothing but myself.

By switching to Rails, I’m joining something big, rather than building something small.

I can tell you I’m really not enjoying being outside of my little PHP comfort zone at all, but this is easily offset by the knowledge that I’m aligning myself with some beautiful code and truly amazing community.

To Marten, David and those have helped me on IRC and AIM in the past day or two (and to those who will help in the future), I thank you sincerely.

So what does this mean for TextThing?

Good question. There’s no doubt that PHP is more accessible to developers than Ruby/Rails right now, so I need to keep that in mind. The way I see it, there are a few options here:

1. do it in Rails
2. finish the PHP version
3. let someone else take over the PHP version

I’m leaning towards #1, because there’s no point in releasing software that I no longer believe in or will be motivated to improve and refine, but it may take a little while to get into the zone with Rails and find the smartest way to do things.

I’ve got well over 200 people on the TextThing Beta testers list, so I appreciate that quite a few of you are eagerly awaiting some sort of release. I’ll try to decide what I’m doing sooner rather than later.