I have a different take on Rails. It's actually something that has attracted a lot of interest from Java people sick of writing too much code, as well as scripting language people who want something that's relatively clean, that basically utilizes a lot of best practices in one bundle.

I like it a lot, and do not consider myself one of the "crap producing PHP crowd".

Also, how can you equate Ruby to PHP? They're very different in terms of philosophy and design. Ruby has all kinds of nice language features that make it a pleasure to use. PHP basically borrows things from here and there, and was never a very "inspired" programming language.

In general, people like to do things faster to achieve the result ASAP. Most people have a short patience level.

Why do you thing startup is using Rails? because they want to get rich fast by throwing their simple products faster.

People can't wait for 8 months to see their work comes to fruition.

Basically it's human nature to like Ruby on Rails, not because of the technical merit.

Given what we know about program length vs bugs (it's pretty linear), I think it's a "technical merit" that Rails lets you write shorter, clearer code. In an environment where you're not sure what you're doing is going to go anywhere, and where you need to be able to turn on a dime, shorter, clearer code is also going to be an advantage.

Why don't you like Hibernate? It has never let me down so far, and I am positive that it is way superior to ActiveRecords. At least it also handles lots of special cases that are not implemented in AR. I also like the HSQL syntax.

It is very bloated. Typical Java style. Too much XML (or anotattions), lots of "magic" happening, without you knowing what's going on. For complicated joins, you are much better off with just SQL (maybe using some utilities like Jakarta's DButil).

Hibernate is just another complexity with a steep curve, and it's propertary stuff to learn (HQL ?).

If you must do a ORM, I like Apache's Cayenne. It comes with a very nice utility, which creates everything for you. Much simpler than Hibernate.

Overrall I'd rather not use java. Python seems a much better fit for web development, thou it's most popular framework, Django, suffers a lot of the same stuff as Rails.

And Ruby is an ugly language. Too perl-ish.

No way you would create a join with pure SQL, filling all the objects fields by hand is just too much pain. I found HQL very intuitive to use, it is almost exactly like SQL, only with a few shortcuts. The learning curve was not so steep either.

Hibernate does one thing, and does it well. With the annotations, it has improved even more. What parts of it do you consider magic? Magic is not necessarily a bad thing - I like the magic of higher level programming languages that shield me from the gory details of assembly language. I just don't like it if code is not readable anymore without knowing the magic.

I will look into Cayenne on occasion. Hibernate is the industry standard now, though, and for a good reason in my opinon.

I would like to move to a more dynamic language, though...

Maybe using GORMS (the ORM from Grails, based on Hibernate) standalone in a Java project would be nice.

>And Ruby is an ugly language. Too perl-ish.

Definately a taste thing, but I would agree (having done a bit of both over the last year). Ruby OO is nice, but then OO is often the cause of problems for me (python makes quasi functional styles easy).

People don't really use XML with hibernate (and haven't for some years from what I see). Hibernate does try to cater for every corner case though (perhaps the cause of the "bloat"). But its the 80/20 rule again - most people only want 20% of the features, the problem is that every one wants a different 20% (hence you get subjective bloat).

> Ruby is just PHP 2.0, or at least it seems that the same crowd that sweared by PHP few years ago, are attracted to it and "have seen the light".

Ruby is PHP 2.0? Have you spent any time with Ruby, or have you only looked at Rails, one of several Ruby Web frameworks?

I suspect few ex-PHPers are doing straight-up Ruby coding.

Del.icio.us are rewriting in PHP with the Symfony framework:

http://www.symfony-project.com/blog/2007/10/02/delicious-pre...

Why would they choose that??

I think the crap producing PHP crowd the peeps are referring to are those developers who use plain jane php with their webpages (logic mixed with presentation). Believe me I was one of those guys and I hated myself for it. Now there are real serious PHP frameworks out there that do a very nice job of MVC (obviously due to the popularity of RoR). Symfony, Code Igniter, CakePHP(to some extent) just to name a few. So don't worry there is still hope for PHP yet.