plasticrain.com

Firstly, you might be wondering what Swipe (or Rails) is. Swipe is the aTech Media developed framework which was based on our own MOAT principles (modules, object, action and template) and was written in PHP5.

Advantages of using Swipe

• developed on PHP, therefore easy to deploy sites onto standard hosting environments
• in-depth knowledge of the framework as it was coded by ourselves
• closed source therefore reduced security implications
• easy to encode projects using the ioncube encoder

Disadvantages of using Swipe

• not very flexible
• no third party plugins available, everything needs to be coded manually
• complicated deployment process involving standard subversion updates and checkouts on the remote server
• duplication of code

On the other hand, Ruby on Rails is a highly dynamic and flexible open source framework written in Ruby (rather than PHP) based on MVC principles (model, view, controller) and DRY (dont’ repeat yourself).

Advantage of using Rails

• large number of third party plugins available
• easy deployment recipes using capistrano
• highly flexible
• no code duplication

Disadvantages of using Rails

• when selling to clients, they can be uneasy about using a relatively new framework and perceived lack of Rails developers in the UK
• deployment on a non thread-safe web server such as Mongrel can cause some issues under heavy load unless addressed
• not as much in-depth knowledge of the framework “gotchas”
• open source leads to more possible security implications (although not a problem is addressed)

“Can’t live without” features in Rails which wern’t in Swipe

I’m first to admit that Swipe was a long way behind Rails. Was anyone not expecting this? It had about 4 months of development from a sinhle developer behind it whereas Rails has many years and many developers. The list is just some of the brilliant features of Rails which we couldn’t live without:

• RJS templates for AJAX functionality
• built-it page and fragment caching
• wide variety of useful plugins
• integration with protoype and scriptaculous
• rake tasks
• capistrano
• and many more features

We now use Rails for all our new work and are even moving some PHP sites and projects over to Rails to make our lives easier.