Hacker News Reader

Comment by indy | Hacker News Reader

Excellent book, although slightly surprising that the inventors of Ruby on Rails are using PHP to serve the content.

We used PHP to serve up a couple of includes. That tech was implemented before Rails was born. It works so there's no reason to change it.

Thanks, I assumed it would have been for a pragmatic reason

They used PHP in several places, mostly presentational pages, where the only thing needed were some "includes". Most of these today are replaced by brochure [1], but the legacy remains.

[1] https://github.com/sstephenson/brochure

At the time this book was written, 37Signals couldn't keep a Rails stack running for more than a few hours yet, according to that old rant by Zed Shaw.

When Zed Shaw wrote that rant 37signals already had thousands of customers for its Rails apps (plural).

That does not make his statement false. It said they were restarting servers all day to keep it running. Maybe they didn't feel the need to add their book to that maintenance mess.

There's no reason to try to cover up the fragility of the early Rails web stack. That's in the past. It's much more stable today, with many more choices of software at all layers, than it was in 2006.

I think it's far-fatched to suggest that the "maintenance mess" of hosting static content with Rails alongside what were then the most demanding Rails apps deployed anywhere caused them to look to PHP. I also think you're being pointlessly snarky.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com