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I'm in the process of building a rather big web application with PHP + Codeigniter. When I first began this project I was excited by the hosting provider PHPFog product of PHP-as-a-service. The idea of simply developing my application and not having to worry about server maintenance, setup, securing, etc appealed to me.

However, I've had far too many issues with PHPFog to be comfortable trusting it with hosting my application. I've run into situations where I've deleted a file from my git repository, pushed it to my remote repo at phpfog, and wound up with the file not actually being removed on one or all of my application servers. The service is also supposed to provide newrelic for application monitoring however this only worked briefly and hasn't worked at all since August 10th despite numerous complaints. And their customer service is far from satisfactory in helping solve all of these problems.

So now I'm considering alternatives, and Heroku has caught my attention. Heroku seems like a much more mature cloud application platform. However it does not provide PHP hosting. Instead it provides ROR, Java, Node.js, and Clojure.

How difficult would it be for someone with a lot of experience in PHP (and the Codeigniter framework) to learn Ruby + Rails and rebuild an application? Both organize code in the MVC pattern, so I hope that means my views would only require modification of their hooks to match ruby's syntax. I've already designed my database and all of the SQL queries to access the data I need from my models in CI. What do you guys think?

EDIT 1: So I've watched this video as an introduction to ROR development: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzj723LkRJY

And my initial reaction is 'So ROR is like a coloring book?' I'm skeptical when I see huge chunks of an application come together via something as simple 'scaffolding.' I don't know what to think other than I'm afraid that ROR sacrifices some of the granularity/control I'm used to with php

EDIT 2: I've recently discovered https://cloudcontrol.com/ They appear to offer the same type of hosting with PHP-as-a-service that PHPFog offers but with more control, such as the ability to directly access your database and auto-scaling. Still the great idea of a git-push to deploy to multiple servers without having to deal with setting them up manually. The only thing I dislike is that their datacenters are based in Ireland (Amazon AWS). However they told me that they're planning on moving to the US in the next 3 months and offering pricing in USD.

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    Ignore scaffolding, hardly anyone who is a true RoR developer will use it. Commented Aug 30, 2011 at 4:47
  • are you seriously going to rewrite your entire application to another language because one hosting provider has let you down? there are thousands of php hosting providers. Are you not able to find another suitable one? Commented Aug 30, 2011 at 4:57
  • @bumperbox, I'm interested in application hosting as a service. Heroku and PHPFog offer this. I've decided it's not worth it to take the route of server management, ssh-ing into my boxes and setting up servers, firewalls, building deployment scripts, etc. Amazon's ElasticBeanstalk, PHPFog, and Heroku are the only providers that I know of that offer this kind of hosting. PHPFog is the only one for PHP Commented Aug 30, 2011 at 5:00
  • not sure of the exact features you require, but have you looked at rackspace cloudsites (not cloudservers that is different), or ms azure even supports php from what i have read (haven't tried it though). or even shared hosting from a premium provider (really depends on your throughput if this will work) Commented Aug 30, 2011 at 6:37

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While yes they both are MVC, yes both Ruby and PHP are scripting languages, and yes you shouldn't require much modification to your views other than changing the php hooks to ruby hooks, I think you are fooling yourself if you think it is just an easy conversion.

Ruby as a language is IMO far superior to PHP. It allows you to do so much more with so much less code. If you were to convert your PHP code to Ruby code by replacing each call with its equivalent, you wouldn't be doing it the Ruby way.

On top of that, Rails as a framework is far more mature and powerful than CodeIgniter. It will provide you far greater flexibility and convention-based help that you will code things a lot differently than if you were using CI.

Added to that, you will want to use ActiveRecord as your ORM and should write database migrations to create your database, so all those SQL scripts you have written will be pretty much useless.

If you decide that porting your app to RoR is the way to go, then I wholeheartedly encourage you to take some time and learn Ruby and Rails, and then rewrite your application as if you were doing a Rails app from scratch. You'll be amazed at how quickly you can get a project up and running.

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ActiveRecord concerns me with performance, with pure SQL I can tweak my queries any way I want to improve them. A solution that's database-independent almost feels like it's too far separated from control to provide optimal performance
ActiveRecord is a very mature ORM, and there is heaps of information on the net about optimising your database with ActiveRecord. I would argue that 90% of the time spent on your database is most probably spent creating scripts and queries to handle basic CRUD functionality which you get out of the box with ActiveRecord. In saying that, you don't need to use ActiveRecord with Rails if you really don't want to.
Rails allows you to write pure SQL, though most situations don't require it.
Honestly, I can't believe your advice was to rewrite a completed application in a different language. That's like me telling you to write your answer in German just because I think it's nicer.
His question was how difficult is it for him to port his application over to Rails, to which my reply is if he is going to do that learn Ruby and Rails properly before venturing down this path as he will tackle the problem a lot differently than he would in PHP. Plus I don't see anywhere in his question where he says that the application is completed.
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Before this question turns into the typical Ruby vs PHP discussion, and before you embark on an (almost) impossible task, you should consider other hosting providers. There are many to choose from, some of whom offer this "PHP as a service" you're looking for.

Please realize that porting a PHP application to ROR or Ruby is not an easy task. You may as well start again (in a language you know little about, no doubt). You shouldn't base your programming language on bad hosting experience or whatever that guy said. Use what you're comfortable with.

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This one is a must read for you

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/09/7_reasons_i_switched_back_to_p_1.html

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