Should I heed Derek Sivers' warnings about migrating from PHP to Rails?
Austin Ziegler wrote an interesting response to that article:
On Derek Siver’s Return to PHP…
The gist of it is:
Derek chose the technology for the wrong reasons. He chose it partially based on the hype of Rails, but he envisioned it as a silver bullet that would magically make his application better just because it’s in Rails.
Rails didn’t fit Derek’s application model for CD Baby, and Derek’s application model is more important than the technology to be used, since it represents a business he understands well.
He ignored his existing experts for the new technology. Neither he nor his employees knew Ruby aside, perhaps, from playing around with it. This wasn’t a technology that was deemed to be appropriate from experience; this was a technology deemed appropriate by management (sorry Derek, you might still be getting your hands dirty with code, but you’re still management).
Derek approached the project as a whole-environment ground-up rewrite with a One Big Day deployment, without considering ways to phase it in over time. It’s almost always possible to find interface points where you can replace one broken piece at a time. Ultimately, this is what the Rails folks wouldshould tell you anyway: replace one area at a time, each with a different codebase. Interface them as REST-ful services. Don’t make them depend on a single database schema.
Re-writing an existing site is almost always a bad idea. It's hard to put your heart into retreading an old wheel. I worked on a rewrite of a site from CGIs to a Java app server and saw several programmers quit because of it. For one, they preferred their old way of doing things and did not want to learn Java. Secondly, I believe they did not have the enthusiasm to re-write a ton of legacy code that they had been maintaining reluctantly to begin with. Far better to try Rails out on a new task and see how it fares. At least then you are putting it on an even footing with PHP in the psychological motivation sweepstakes.