Back to Basics: Rails to PHP
Great post by the CD Baby's Derek Sivers about how he tried to convert the entire site to Rails then scrapped the entire effort after 2 years and went back to PHP:
Back in January 2005, I announced on the O’Reilly blog that I was going to completely scrap over 100,000 lines of messy PHP code in my existing CD Baby website, and rewrite the entire thing in Rails, from scratch.
I hired one of the best Rails programmers in the world and we set off on this huge task with intensity. The first few months showed good progress, and Jeremy could not have been more amazing, twisting the deep inner guts of Rails to make it do things it was never intended to do.
Two years later, after various setbacks, we were less than halfway done. The entire music distribution world had changed, and we were still working on the same goddamn rewrite. I said fuckit, and we abandoned the Rails rewrite.
I didn’t abandon the rewrite IDEA, though. I just asked myself one important question:
“Is there anything Rails can do, that PHP CAN’T do?”
The answer is no.
I threw away 2 years of Rails code, and opened a new empty Subversion respository.
Then in a mere TWO MONTHS, by myself, not even telling anyone I was doing this, using nothing but vi, and no frameworks, I rewrote CD Baby from scratch in PHP. Done! Launched! And it works amazingly well.
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