On the SitePoint PHP blog Phil Sturgeon has written up a comparison of the PHP language versus Ruby suggests that we all just get along from the perspective of a developer that works with both happily.

Quite often you see developers who have a lot of experience in one language try to play with another, then make a rather quick comparison between the two. This comparison is usually quite worthless, but the clickbait titles get them a lot of traffic.

Instead of doing that, I thought it would be interesting to have a slightly more fair comparison, from the perspective of someone who really enjoys writing both PHP and Ruby, and has done so for years. The aim here is not to find out which is “better”, but to point out a few key things I like about Ruby and its ecosystem.

He starts with some of the basics conceptual differences between the two languages including the differences with methods/variables/properties and type hinting versus duck typing. He also covers some "fun features" of each language including:

• Nested classes
• Using debuggers (and the tools offered)
• "Unless" handling
• Predicate methods
• Shorter array syntax (in Ruby)

There's many more mentioned through the end of the post too, so be sure to check out the rest in the remainder of the article. Each point come with some brief code examples show how the feature is implemented depending on which language is being discussed.

If you're a PHPFog user, you know that they're discontinuing the service in favor of their AppFog product. If you're looking to migrate over to this from PHPFog, you should check out this new article from PHPMaster.com with some of the differences between the two services.

Have you heard PHPFog is coming to an end? No, well - it is. That’s right, in a recent announcement on their mailing list, the company has said that PHPFog will be no more by the end of January, 2013. But if you’re on their platform, don’t panic! The new, combined platform may be even better than what you’re accustomed to with them now.

He talks about some of the things that are different including the technologies it employs, addons it provides, the differing deployment process and when teh final cut-off date is. He links to their own migration guide for most of the steps but mentions one specific change that might trip you up - the change to store connection information in the "VCAP_SERVICES" environment variable.

Paul Jones, lead developer of the Solar framework project has posted a few differences between his framework and the just released Zend Framework.

Even though (or perhaps because) the Solar project pre-dates the newly-released Zend Framework by about a year, I've had a couple of private emails asking me if I will discontinue Solar, or rewrite Solar on top of the Zend Framework. The short answer to both of these, at least for now, is "No - Solar is not going away." Especially now that I'm not at Zend any more.

He lists a few similarities first (based on general topics) but follows it quickly with some pretty significant differences between the two (with an emphasis on the "unified" nature of Solar vs Zend). Thrown in are also some other features that Solar has that Zend doesn't at this time - built-in localization, form processing, etc. Of course, there are some coming from the other perspective (that Zend has that Solar doesn't), though it's mostly things like "great marketing apparatus" and "a dozen regular individual and corporate developers and the backing of a real business" as well as lots specialty classes and more automated testing and documentation.

There's not any bitterness between the two frameworks, though, and Paul reminds us that it's not one versus the other - it's more about pulling in the pieces of each that work for you.

Paul Jones, lead developer of the Solar framework project has posted a few differences between his framework and the just released Zend Framework.

Even though (or perhaps because) the Solar project pre-dates the newly-released Zend Framework by about a year, I've had a couple of private emails asking me if I will discontinue Solar, or rewrite Solar on top of the Zend Framework. The short answer to both of these, at least for now, is "No - Solar is not going away." Especially now that I'm not at Zend any more.

He lists a few similarities first (based on general topics) but follows it quickly with some pretty significant differences between the two (with an emphasis on the "unified" nature of Solar vs Zend). Thrown in are also some other features that Solar has that Zend doesn't at this time - built-in localization, form processing, etc. Of course, there are some coming from the other perspective (that Zend has that Solar doesn't), though it's mostly things like "great marketing apparatus" and "a dozen regular individual and corporate developers and the backing of a real business" as well as lots specialty classes and more automated testing and documentation.

There's not any bitterness between the two frameworks, though, and Paul reminds us that it's not one versus the other - it's more about pulling in the pieces of each that work for you.