Oracle is running a free workshop at its Headquarters on August 25th. This is a call for developers interested in developing applications in PHP, Ruby/Rails, Java, .Net or even wanting to use Oracle's free SQL Developer tool or learn web development with Oracle's APEX product.

They'll be providing lunch and the information, you just show up and soak it all in. You can find more information about the event here (and register to reserve your spot).

As of now, we are moving through the era of web application frameworks. That's the landscape we are surrounded with. Plenty of frameworks have been built during these years broadly categorized under software frameworks, web application frameworks and JavaScript frameworks (or libraries), and plenty more are being developed.

He starts with these frameworks:

• CakePHP
• CodeIgniter
• Symfony
• Prado
• Django
• Ruby on Rails

He looks at the non-PHP frameworks first to see how difficult they'd be to get into. Despite reservations about the different language structure, he shows favoritism towards Ruby on Rails. He has reviewed the PHP frameworks yet, so it's not a final decision.

Last few days I have been playing with Ruby and Rails, again. Today, when someone was asking on a forum about the efficiency of web frameworks, I thought I'd give the few frameworks I work with some more benchmark testing.

His benchmarking is based on basic "Hello World" page requests for each of the frameworks. His results were interesting with CodeIgniter coming out with the fewest number of requests responded to (per second) and Rails coming out on top by a margin of about eighty or ninety over CodeIgniter/Kohana.

I often use this when implementing a simple login screen for a password protected section of my application. In a Zend Framework application you can implement a preDispatch() function in a Zend_Controller_Action which will run before an action is dispatched. This lets you setup your filter to check to see if the visitor is logged in or not. If the visitor is not logged in, you can redirect them to the login screen of your application.

He includes example code to show its usefulness - checking to see two things: is a user is logged in and to see if they're allowed to use a certain resource.

Rails for PHP Developers is a new site for PHP developers who are also interested in Rails and Ruby. PHP and Ruby are great complementary tools that are sometimes seen as adversarial, which is really unfortunate. We use both and we'll be writing regular articles to help cross-pollinate ideas and promote collaboration between the communities.

There's already some good content there - useful perlisms in ruby, a look at PHP object attributes and some information about the release of the site itself.

If you are a PHP developer chances are you have heard some of the buzz on Ruby on Rails, an open source web framework for rapid application development. [...] These are similarities and differences of Ruby compared to PHP. If you know PHP, this should give you a good and quick insight in what Ruby is all about and how it compares to PHP.

Some of the similarities include the dynamic typing, class scoping, heredoc abilities and current object references. Differences include syntax differences, method calling, naming conditions and Ruby's lack of interface/abstract classes.

I'm still working on the next article in my series looking at PHP on servers, so in the mean time, check out this simple way to emulate Ruby's nice way of handling separate getter, setter and state query methods in PHP.

He admits his example isn't as elegant as the Ruby method, but it does get the job done. Code for the method is included in his post ready for cut and pasting.

Next week as part of Oracle OpenWorld we have some activities dedicated to dynamic languages. Here's the list for easy access.

Included in his list are sessions like:

• The Way to the Web with PHP and Oracle Database - Christopher Jones
• Scale Your PHP Application to Tens of Thousands of Connections - Luxi Chidambaran
• Digging Deeper into Dynamic Scripting Languages: Using Ruby on Rails with Oracle Database - Kuassi Mensah

Back in January 2005, I announced on the O'Reilly blog that I was going to completely scrap over 100,000 lines of messy PHP code in my existing CD Baby (cdbaby.com) website, and rewrite the entire thing in Rails, from scratch. [...] The first few months showed good progress, and Jeremy could not have been more amazing, twisting the deep inner guts of Rails to make it do things it was never intended to do.

But at every step, it seemed our needs clashed with Rails' preferences. (Like trying to turn a train into a boat. It's do-able with a lot of glue. But it's damn hard. And certainly makes you ask why you're really doing this.)

Recounting the rest of the story, Derek mentions the turning point ("Is there anything Rails can do that PHP CAN'T do?") and the speed at which they were able to make up for the two years of lost development time. To helps others make a decision for their project, he also includes seven reasons why he made the decision to switch back, including:

• Our entire company's stuff was in php: don't underestimate integration
• Don't want what i don't need
• I love SQL
• Programming languages are like girlfriends: the new one is better because *you* are better

There's also been several bloggers in the PHP community that have responded to the article:

• Elizabeth Naramore - "Derek Sivers' Article on RoR vs PHP"
• Paul Jones - "Is there anything Rails can do that PHP cannot do? *No.*"
• Terry Chay - "Why PHP triumphs over Ruby"
• Jeff Moore - "Ruby versus PHP or There and Back Again"

One of the cool things I like about Ruby on Rails is the use of "migrations" for maintaining your DB. Migrations have proven to be pretty handy in keeping a local database in sync with the work of other developers. [...] Because migrations are incremental and they are done in a structured manner, it is a great way of pushing out new DB changes to the production database servers.

His framework, Ruckusing Migrations, is a modular framework that makes use of some of the more advanced features of PHP5. It's portable (via an adapter interface) and uses a generic task interface (task files) to load functionality into the framework. There's also plenty of API hooks to allow for a developer to easily create their own custom operations.

Check out the project homepage for more information.