SilverStripe

O'Reilly Ruby Blog sees the light

Posted by Sigurd on 25 September 2007

O'Reilly blogger Derek Sivers yesterday wrote an opinion post, 7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails, and in doing so, reiterated the architectural decisions we made in SilverStripe over a year ago.

Ruby on Rails has been hyped as a programming language for a few years, and while this is laudable for creating a critical mass of programs, programmers, tools, and book sales, I'm glad to see that the environment has matured such that people are:

• more likely to use Ruby on Rails for what it's good at, rather than use simply because it's the new, fun kid on the block
• realising most "exciting" features of Ruby on Rails have been in languages like PHP and Python for years, but that very few people have used them. Your programming discipline, and using the right tool, is what gives you mileage. 

Derek's article reminded me of the presentation Sam did at the OSCON software conference a few months ago, Ending Rails Envy in PHP5. Just like Derek, SilverStripe benefits from exactly the same benefits of good program design, where you can benefit from the heightened sense of Ruby On Rails-like object oriented code including reflections and separating your code between models, views and controllers.

This is why we give you a powerful framework, and at the same time, give you the ability to hit the ground running by having fully-featured, entire modules like blog, forum, ecommerce, gallery, and flickr mashups.

It is also why we endorse the GoPHP 5.2 campaign, and why SilverStripe 2.1 will now have a warning if you have less than PHP 5.2: earlier versions of PHP keep you writing ugly, unmaintainable code and simply do not allow contemporary programming practices.

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