I have been working professionally as a PHP programmer for a long while, I recently began working for a new company and we are working all in rails.. I will be doing some recording of my progress.

Having worked previously in ASP (many moons ago) and then working in PHP for six years I first have to say that rails is “different”.
I have basically avoided frameworks as the ones in php try to turn php into something else that it is not. My general development was speedy though maintenance was not always the best on “fast” sites. For me, I have a base library of functions that I have found or written that I know I use and in general use to build up an application quickly.. I think part of my general avoidance of frameworks was that I didn`t want to use a different templating system, I have an extremely flexible one I made (and since have seen horrid templating systems in other corps, I think most people don`t understand the basics of templating at all. If you are going to create a templating system don`t even give the templates themselves the php extension, use .tpl or .tplt or whatever just to keep you from being seduced into that and running loops in them instead of reusing fragments.
Anyway, Rails provides a templating system, it provides a nice set of classes and it starts you off with excellent organization and does a lot of the work for you.
I have actually found it is easy to switch to rails for the simple fact that it is NOT using php, because I would be too tempted to start just changing things and hacking it up. I really am more of a backend programmer than anything, I prefer JSON+JS for frontend work.

There are many many things I really like in rails so far, the AJAX support is astounding, in a few lines I can do what used to be a full days work. I am in love with database migrations, and the database model system, in one fell swoop it fixes 75% of the issues you run into with php apps and data validation.

It is not all roses though:
One of the main gripes I have is that the rails docs does not have a comment system like php.net … this is a total travesty and it needs to be done, most people get more from the comments than from the documentation. I myself have contributed several hundred comments to the PHP site over the years (which comprises of the majority of all the php-ncurses docs + undocumented php-ncurses functions) comgin from PHP this totally BLOWS not being able to have this kind of resource. Sure, fxri is a nice way to find stuff, but it would really be handy to not have to search all over to find rails docs with a little programmer commentary.

Rails has some tight control over globals and it is never easy for a programmer to know the “scope” of a variable or a function. Take “request” for instance, I had to dig around for a while to finally figure out this is where the rails equivalent of the PHP $GLOBALS was, and then I found out that it was not actually “global” because I could not call it within functions in a helper. Also it was not entirely clear what the @ and : variable signifiers were from the start, this was frustrating until I sort of figured it out.

The only other issue is not really rails specific, but due to the fact that working with rails you need to have so many files open that trying to use my editor “gvim” is difficult at best, even with buffers keeping on window for each directory I end up with thirty gvims open and have to hunt for things so I switched to jedit which kind of bothers me a bit becuase over the years I have collected some useful vim scripts that I love.. one is a code columnizer (nice groupings of code all line up) and others are for comments and timestamping as well as in-file only completion (which is handy when you are working with strange files to have completion for some of the strange stuff)

Not a lot of gripes really, rails is nice and I will be writing a lot more about here saying that I am diving really deep into it and soon will be working on server-side issues a lot.

I will try to keep this up to date a bit more.

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