Fwd: Ruby On Rails / Web Technologies

[Bill Cavalieri]

On Thu, 2005-07-14 at 15:14 -0500, Josh Charles wrote:
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Josh Charles <josh.charles at gmail.com>
> Date: Jul 14, 2005 3:14 PM
> Subject: Re: Ruby On Rails / Web Technologies
> To: Bill Cavalieri <bcavalieri at lumensoftware.com>
> 
> 
> > Whats something asp.net does over php?  I have yet to find something I
> > can't do in php.
> 
> Generics
Its not difficult to emulate generics with php callbacks.  Many
documented examples of this, just google, c++ has had generics for eons,
and not surprising that people would come up with ways in php either.

> Operator Overloading
I'm no fan of operator overloading.  Lots of talk about it in php lists,
but I have to agree with the core php developers on rejecting it thus
far (people have written patches to provide it).  Imho, operator
overloading really makes debugging difficult.

> Strongly Typed Data Types
Thats a religious battle thats been around since types themselves.  You
can argue the merits of dynamically vs static types all day, If its
important to know the type, php has several methods to determine what
the type can be (its dynamic after all).

> Function Overloading
Not sure of the merit of function overloading, when php types are
dynamic anyways (although I could see if number of arguments vary).  But
easy enough to emulate with func_get_args(), and some type checking code
in the function.

> URL Rewriting without resorting to writing C modules for the webserver
> (there might be a way to do this with PHP, but I've not found it)
I'm not clear what your wanting to do here, but there is no shortage in
methods of url rewriting.

> Databinding to either business objects or datasets
> Number of controls (Gridview, Details View)
No shortage of php classes to do grids, tables, graphs, etc.....

> Personalization with custom objects
> Automatic Membership / Subscription functionality with the Provider
A zillion ways to do this, lots and lots of pre-written classes as well.

Wouldn't this just be methods of whatever class you use?  You don't have
to use the asp.net "Advanced Personalization Services" either to do
this, not like this didn't exist before ms wrote the provider class
themselves :)

> Design Pattern for customization
Now this is just plain silly, plenty of ways, even several php centric
books available on the subject.

> Multiple Languages possibilities inside projects or applications
I use perl, php, and even soap calls back to a realbasic daemon in
projects/applications.  I know asp.net does it differently, but
definitely ways to do it with php.

> 
> Hmm, that all I can come up with now, but that's a big list.