I was waiting for my friend to get out of a meeting, and was sitting at Mario’s Cigar Shop nursing a beer, and reading about Ruby on Rails (RoR) vs. PHP. I’ve done object oriented programming, and server scripting, and I’m lazy and end up doing server scripting for any quick project. My haiku database has been the application model for about 5 different applications, and now I’m using it for the Business Idea. Having that hour to sit, sip a Pilsner and read about RoR was surprisingly fun. I realized, after reading thread after thread on my tiny iPhone screen, that folks differed on the merits of the systems much the same reasons that had been rumbling around in my mind. I’m database-centric, so I tend to like a scripting language that does simple page-based application development. Sounds like RoR has a recommended database model. So I wouldn’t like that. The hour or so reading a lesson on tutorials on RoR (my friend ended up being super late), further helped me realize that while RoR may be a lot more scalable, for a prototype, PHP would suffice.

What surprised me today, after that hour or so investigating other options, I went back to my codebase and started cleaning it up and asking hard questions, basically getting out of my comfort zone, finding out new ways of doing the same ole things I always did. In retrospect, considering another language and (gasp) the idea that I had made a wrong decision in programming languages opened me up the novel idea that I may not know all there is to know about PHP- and I reached that great point of enlightenment where I found out what I didn’t know. So I’ve been cleaning up my array handling and recordset manipulation, setting up a function page, and tomorrow and this weekend I’ll work on really polishing up this baby. Whew.

Above is a yummy squash soup made from Bon Appetit. The sage breadcrumbs on top are totally worth the 10 minutes it took to make them. Don’t use Peppridge Farm breadcrumbs, it really ruins the subtlty of the soup, and the sage brings out a great accent in the soup, too.