What about Ruby on Rails?... from a PHP Guy

Presented at Ruby Conf Malaysia

Transcript

1. Michael Cheng @coderkungfu
 @engineersftw
2. Senior Software Engineer, Singapore Power’s Digital Technologies Team
3. …from a PHP guy What About Ruby on Rails? 3
4. Singapore PHP User Group (started in 2007)
5. 5 Rasmus Lerdorf, Creator of PHP
6. 6 PHPConf.Asia 2015
7. 7 Joined Neo Innovation in 2014
8. 8 TechLadies Bootcamp (2017) - Mountbatten Vocational School
9. 9 Yukihiro Matsumoto, Creator of Ruby
10. MVC Web Frameworks in PHP 10
11. Ruby vs PHP? 11
12. Similarities • Interpreted languages • Dynamically typed • Easy to understand syntax • Object Oriented 12
13. Differences • PHP • Web centric • Not quite a language - collection of functions • Improved with PHP 7 • Ruby • General purpose (more effort to make web) • An expressive programming language 13
14. Syntax Compared 14 “A string” “Hello, $name” 42 3.146 $variable $obj->variable Klass::$static_var SOME_CONSTANT Klass::SOME_CONST “A string” “Hello #{name}” 42 3.146 local_variable $global_var Klass.class_var SOME_CONSTANT Klass::SOME_CONST
15. Syntax Compared 15 array(10, 20, 30) array(1, 2, 3, 4, 5) array( “a” => “Apple”, “b” => “Banana” ) [10, 20, 30] [1..5] { a: “Apple”, b: “Banana” }
16. Syntax Compared 16 if($morning == true){ echo “Hullo” } if ($morning) echo “Hullo” if morning? puts “Hullo” end puts “Hullo” if morning?
17. Syntax Compared 17 class Tea extends Beverages{ private $water private $milk public function __construct(){ $this->water = true; $this->milk = true; } public function is_good(){ return true; } private function secret(){ return “hello”; } } class Tea < Beverages def initialize @water = true @milk = true end def good? true end private def secret “hello” end end
18. Where Ruby Wins! • No semi-colons needed at end of statements • Dot is not used for concatenation • Calling methods on objects with 1 less character • @user.name and not $user->name • Curly braces are not necessary • What opening tags? <?php 18
19. What I like about Ruby? • Tooling support • Testing, profiling and debugging are not an after-thought • Dependency management is easy • Easily switch between Ruby versions • Open source community / ecosystem • Problems solved by smart people 19
20. Ruby on Rails 20
21. What I like about Rails? • No need to depend on separate web server for development (build-in web server) • Command Line Interface (CLI) support and tools • rails new <project_name> • Track DB schema changes (relatively) easily • "There's a Gem for that”™ 21
22. What I like about Rails? • MVP friendly • Commonly used stuff are already build - just add the Gem, configure and go! • From idea to product in short time - and its relatively secure and beta tester ready • Many deployment options • PaaS - Heroku, Azure • Self host via VPS, shared hosting 22
23. 23 More Ruby than PHP repositories
24. 24 Engineers.SG
25. 25 Upload site for Engineers.SG - Rails, Nginx, Passenger, Sidekiq
26. 26 Bootcamp 2017
27. Downside • BYO web server (for static content) • Quite memory intensive • Mostly solvable by throwing machines at the problem. (i.e. more money) 27
28. Reflections • These are merely tools for building great web apps • Figure out the best tool for the job • Test, Build, Validate, Iterate • Knowledge in design patterns is important in understanding how we build apps better • Can still write 7000 line spaghetti Ruby files 28
29. Where to start? • TryRuby - http://tryruby.org • RailsGirls Guide - http://guides.railsgirls.com • Ruby On Rails Tutorial - https://www.railstutorial.org • RailsCast - http://railscasts.com (outdated, but good starting point) • Ruby Meetup - https://www.meetup.com/ruby-malaysia/ 29
30. Michael Cheng @coderkungfu
 @engineersftw