Should Wikipedia's software be rewritten in Ruby on Rails? Options Rating

[LamontStormstar]

Should Wikipedia's software be rewritten in Ruby on Rails? Discuss.

[Somey]

Personally, now that Delphi for PHP exists, I can't imagine why anyone would want to switch from PHP to Ruby on Rails, unless they were already skilled in it of course.

[LamontStormstar]

Personally, now that Delphi for PHP exists, I can't imagine why anyone would want to switch from PHP to Ruby on Rails, unless they were already skilled in it of course.

I once worked on Delphi back in the 1990s. I'd tried visual basic, then I tried Delphi. Delphi was only a little slower to develop in than Visual Basic and Delphi was more powerful and code was slower. I then tried C++ because a friend recommedned it, which was hard and slow to develop in, though code got even smaller and the program was faster. I later gave up on C++.

I'm not sure what Delphi for PHP is about. Delphi is a bit of a better language than PHP

Java would probably be even slower than PHP. Whenever I go to a website with a java applet, if it is really complex it slows my computer way down.

Server side Java is nothing like client-side java. The slowness you're experiencing is due to your browser launching a JVM inside the browser. Server side Java doesn't have this problem; the JVM is already running in the server and all you get is the same HTML you'd get from the PHP app -- it's just generated that much faster. A properly implemented Java webapp will run rings around a PHP app.

MediaWiki runs 25% faster just by running it within Quercus, which is pretty much just a PHP interpreter written in Java. A full reimplementation in Java would be 50% to 75% faster.

I doubt that a Ruby on Rails implementation would be that much faster as RoR is, like PHP, a fully interpreted language (although the odds are that the RoR interpreter is more efficient than PHP, as PHP's is just about the worst-performing interpreter there is in common use). Java is at least compiled to JVM code. The only way to get faster than that would be to go to a fully compiled language like C or C++.

Hmm... isn't the native PHP interpreter written in C++ or something low-level? If it's not, that's surprising.

[Somey]

I'm not sure what Delphi for PHP is about. Delphi is a bit of a better language than PHP

Delphi's native language is Object Pascal, which I also happen to like better than most. Delphi for PHP is a PHP language implementation using a Delphi-like IDE with access to web-enabled versions of Delphi VCL (Visual Control Library) objects and language functions. If you use a lot of those objects, the results might be slower than a hand-coded PHP-generated page simply because of the additional code, and the extra HTML/CSS required to render them on the browser. But if your server isn't overtaxed, and assuming most users have a reasonably fast connection/machine, it won't be particularly noticeable.

Other than that, it isn't much different from any other PHP implementation on the server side - it's just much easier to work with, dev-wise, and at least as easy as RoR (though I'm not all that experienced with RoR, admittedly). Kelly is correct in that server-side Java is faster than most (if not all) PHP interpreters, but if your website isn't getting thousands of hits a minute, a decent server isn't going to seize up because you're running PHP, and IMO it's more widely supported in the freeware/open-source world.

I agree with the other thing - if you've got a website that requires maximum optimization, no question that you want to be running compiled C++ wherever possible. As long as you or your developers never get hit by a truck, that is! It's bad enough trying to fix other people's bugs in uncompiled PHP and Java files. I'm a little better at it than some folks, but it's hardly my favorite thing to do, if you know what I'm sayin'.