In a new post to his blog, Kurt Schrader suggests that the Ruby language feels more like a playground to him and PHP, more of a factory. (note: pro-Ruby article)

While reading yet another article on why PHP Sucks (today's witty twist, "but It Doesn't Matter") I realized yet another reason that I'm glad to be programming in Ruby.

He sees Ruby as a "big open playground" and languages like PHP as big industrial factories that are more efficient for some things but can also "suck the creativity and life out of the people working in them". He compares a simple bit of Ruby code to PHP code that do essentially the same ask asks why you'd want to do one over the other.

There's plenty of comments supporting things both ways ranging from "that's a bad example" to "I think PHP is more of a playground - a disorganized mess".

Sebastian Bergmann has pointed out something obvious to anyone that's ever tried to work with unit tests in PHP - there's just not that much support for it. The software is there and waiting to be used, but too many developers just don't take advantage of it.

Maybe it took the PHP community a little longer to realize the importance of testing. But now that we know how to build applications that "just work", are fast and scalable, as well as secure, a big topic in the PHP community right now is to implement processes and use techniques that help us assure that the software works correctly throughout the its lifecycle.

He points to some comments made at a recent panel discussion about PHP and testing, the proliferation of frameworks for the language and the things that have no name that developers use every day to make their code "just work".

Mike Naberezny has posted a few more articles to the "Rails for PHP Developers" website (based on this book) covering some more of the basics.

There's three new tutorials posted:

• Ruby Block Scope - the basics of Ruby block scope, a common point of confusion for PHP developers new to Ruby.
• Variable Arguments - an article that shows two common API patterns found in Rails, variable arguments and option hashes, and how to implement them both in PHP.
• Regular Expressions in Ruby - a useful reference that maps all of the common PHP regular expression functions to the equivalents in Ruby.

Check out the rest of the site for even more great content.

Christopher Jones has posted a quick summary of the PHP (and Ruby) sessions at this year's OpenWorld 2007.

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