Lee Blue has started up a series of posts talking about his reasoning for moving back to PHP from Rails in his applications. In his first post of the series, he looks at application "shelf life" and the overall lifespan of the project and how that relates to things like maintainability and upgrade handling.

I plan to write a series of posts about how we develop, deploy, and support our affiliate software and digital downloads applications. And why, after 5 years of Ruby on Rails development we switched back to PHP. One of the reasons is what I refer to as the shelf life of a web application. Let’s talk about what happens to a web application if you just let it sit.

He talks about the "rotting on the vine" that one of his clients' Rails 1.0 application faced when the later versions of the Ruby on Rails framework. He talks about how these kinds of upgrades cost money (and time) and how, with the right selections for the deployment stack, some of the costs could be alleviated. He gives the example of a PHP-based deployment setup and how much of the related technology has been stable and (mostly) unchanging over the years, just with new features being added. He offers a few suggestions to avoid this "app rot" and things startups/freelancers can do to help prevent it in their clients' applications.