'Coming from' rails...to php, help

rubyonrails-talk
1

I have to put together a quick proposal for a site that, for now, is set to be PHP. Hopefully we can change that, but I could use some help with PHP best practices. Are their PHP equivalents for Test:Unit, autotest, capistrano…? basically I just need some buzzwords for this meeting before we make them drink the rails Kool Aide.

Thanks

2

PHP has PHPUnit and Phing - and as noted on other threads the Symfony framework has some rails flavor to it as well.

The difference from my experience as a PHP->Rails convert, is that you can do a lot of the same things in PHP but you have to take a build-it-yourself attitude; whereas Rails, RSpec and Capistrano give you so much more right out of the box.

Here’s a funny story for you guys - I’m working on a huge PHP project right now, and I’m using Rails on my macbook (on the sly, of course) to manage changes to the datamodel with migrations. I hope none of those guys read this list.

  • mitch holds a pinkie up to the corner of his mouth
3

PHP has PHPUnit and Phing - and as noted on other threads the Symfony framework has some rails flavor to it as well.

Symfony is very Rails-ish but (like you) I wish it had migrations...

Its also had its own testing framework (Lime) for some time.

There is some built-in support for deployment and syncing to production servers.

But Im now looking at using Capistrano to deploy our PHP apps :wink:

Here's a funny story for you guys - I'm working on a huge PHP project right now, and I'm using Rails on my macbook (on the sly, of course) to manage changes to the datamodel with migrations. I hope none of those guys read this list.

Damn, wish I had done that from day one!

4

Capistrano is definitely not a Rails-only solution. You definitely should use it for PHP deployment. Heck, I use it for day-to-day administrative tasks!

Rake is the same way.

Migrations rock, and you can set Rails to output as schema.sql so no-one’s the wiser :P.

Otherwise, good luck. Hope you can at least use Ruby tools if not all of Rails.

Jason

5

Thanks for the feedback… we got the project. Now…wanna build it?

6

Just for interest sake. There is PHP on Trax, it is syntacticly equivalent to RoR but using php code.. http://www.phpontrax.com

I don't know how active its dev is?