Without knowing anything about your specific situation, I'll try to answer as best as I can about Zend Framework and Rails.
Presumably you already know PHP, so with Zend Framework you only need to learn the framework. Therefore your speed of development at first will be higher compared to Rails. Out of the box, performance is decent--not great. It can be improved by using autoloading and commenting out the require_once statements, as well as standard PHP strategies (opcode cache, etc.). And it's free, of course. Maintainability is reasonably high with the framework, although major changes still occur (e.g., Zend_Application). These are almost always positive, but these changes necessitate not-infrequent revisiting of existing code. The biggest advantage to Zend Framework, however, is its library of reusable, (generally) high-quality components. You don't have to decide among 2-20 different solutions for ACL or pagination; it's a "batteries included" framework, so to speak. Rails is an older, more established framework, and it has a larger community as well. Code generation is really a minor part of developing anything but a trivial application. Don't be taken in by the "create a blog in 10 seconds" screencasts; you still have to do the heavy lifting. Ease of Ajax is similar in both, and Rails of course has templating as well. Rails is also not hard to deploy--in fact, with projects like Rack, Passenger, and Capistrano, I'd say the Ruby community as a whole has taken deployment more seriously than the PHP community. If deployment is a real concern, something like Maven is where you'll want to focus your energy. Rails does not have the library that Zend Framework has. To install additional functionality you'll probably end up using RubyGems, which means evaluating different options to find the one that best fits your needs. Looking at the overall ecosystem, ActiveRecord and DataMapper are nice, but Doctrine is really strong as well. Zend_Db requires way too much boilerplate code, in my opinion. Perhaps most importantly, Rails' biggest advantage is Ruby itself. PHP as a language just doesn't compare. Anyway, both frameworks are good, but in different ways. -Matt On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 10:10 PM, iceangel89 <comet2...@gmail.com> wrote: > > i am using Zend Framework now, but hear that Ruby on Rails is great, speeds > up development and all. ASP.NET MVC is also out. i am looking at these > alternatives to see what they offer but will like some of ur opinions > > what might be some of the advantages/disadvantages of each? like in terms > of > - speed of development > - speed (performance) of execution > - cost > - etc > > for a start: > Zend Framework my background with this is ~3 mths > > Good: > > * Templating thru Zend_Layouts & Zend_Views > * Zend_Forms, Zend_Validation, Zend_Filter: assists in form inputs > * Zend_Tool now allows for something like Ruby on Rails's CMD code > genration except that its now still very limited in terms of functionality > > Bad: > > * steep learning curve > * can be confusing for me now still > > Ruby on Rails viewed some screencasts only > > Good > > * i like the cmd code generation for controller, actions, models and > forms > * it seems to be easily incorporated with AJAX > > Bad > > * i get the impression that it will be hard to deploy > > ASP.NET MVC also watched a few screencasts only > > Good > > * i like LINQ > * extensive support with VS 2010 will speed up development > > Bad > > * expensive > > -- > View this message in context: > http://www.nabble.com/General---Web-Development-Frameworks-tp23936439p23936439.html > Sent from the Zend Framework mailing list archive at Nabble.com. > >
