Simon Willison’s Weblog

What are the tradeoffs (e.g. development speed, performance, scalability) between using various php frameworks, ruby/rails, or python/django?  Is there any reason to choose one overwhelmingly over another?

27th November 2010

My answer to What are the tradeoffs (e.g. development speed, performance, scalability) between using various php frameworks, ruby/rails, or python/django?  Is there any reason to choose one overwhelmingly over another? on Quora

At this point, I’d argue that the decision between them comes down to programming language rather than framework—the frameworks have mostly converged on a very similar set of features.

All three solutions scale in exactly the same way (shared nothing architecture).

If you’re writing something for people to deploy on their own hosting plans, PHP is far more widely supported. For a service that you host yourself, you need to decide which language ecosystem is the best fit for how you like to develop.

Update 14 months later: I’d argue today that thanks to hosting platforms such as ep.io, Heroku and dotCloud PHP’s hosting advantage isn’t nearly as pronounced.