Comments on: Ruby on Rails pain at Twitter https://quoderat.megginson.com/2007/04/12/ruby-on-rails-pain-at-twitter/ Open information and technology. Thu, 31 May 2007 03:07:34 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Scott https://quoderat.megginson.com/2007/04/12/ruby-on-rails-pain-at-twitter/#comment-671 Thu, 31 May 2007 03:07:34 +0000 http://www.megginson.com/blogs/quoderat/2007/04/12/ruby-on-rails-pain-at-twitter/#comment-671 “instead, I surprised myself by preferring PHP, an ugly hack of a language optimized for script kiddies (I’ve been using it ever since)”
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If Apache had included server side JavaScript (the uber-script-kiddie language) support, PHP would have died on the vine. I have always been dumbfounded by the fact that Microsoft actively supports server side JavaScript (or jscript in the MS world) while the open source Apache community doesn’t (effectively) support JavaScript (Mozilla JavaScript or ECMAScript).

JavaScript is ubiquitous (everywhere) on the client side. Wouldn’t it be nice if the same set of tools could be used on both client and server? In the Microsoft world they can be. In the Open Source world, Apache and server side JavaScript is not a viable option. Bummer.

I use a variety of both server side and client side languages. On IIS paltforms I use JavaScript exclusively (Ok, I’ll admit to using some c# and vbscript, but I swear I’m not going over to the dark side :-). On Apache servers, I use PHP for server side scripting. Obviously that doesn’t work on the client side, so I still use JavaScript on the client side.

Both JavaScript and PHP offer Object Oriented programming methods. For OO development PHP 5 has probably jumped ahead but JavaScript still holds its own (even though it is prototype based).

Did I mention that VBScript works server side on IIS as well as JScript? PHP works on IIS as well (as an add-on), but why bother?

For what it’s worth, I enjoy developing applications. JavaScript is my first choice for both client and server development in IIS environments. On Apache, I use PHP for server side programming. I do think that with PHP, the same tasks can be done more easily and with less code than with server side JavaScript. However, given the choice I would probably prefer end-to-end JavaScript rather than having to code in two different languages.

I guess I could hope for the day when JavaScript includes PHP functionality (simplicity) or for the day when PHP is supported on the client side. On the other hand, I have real world applications that I need to develop today.

Scott

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