How we Choosing the Best Web Designer Company

You recognize that in order to succeed in a competitive market you need to have the best brand experience for your customers. With the great waves of marketing change over the past few years the social and mobile web has given the consumer the power to choose on many different platforms. This leaves you with the task of finding the right agency to deliver your company’s message to your potential customers in the most efficient and effective way possible.

We’ve compiled a checklist for you to help you make the right decision when choosing an agency.

Step 1 – Know your bottom line

Know your bottom line

The first step to work out is what you want your website and internet marketing to achieve. You need to consider carefully your aim, your goals and how you are going to measure success.

For example, if your website is mainly e-commerce your focus is going to be on return-on-investment (ROI), conversion of sales, and building and maintaining your customer base.
If you are launching a new company and you need brand awareness, you will simply be providing information and education about your services or products. So in this case, good visibility and a clear focus is needed.

When you know what you need to accomplish your goals, you will be able to see if an agency fits the bill.

What to do? Ask the agency you’re interested in to provide solid proof of their capabilities. They should be showing you case studies or examples of how they have approached a problem and how they have provided a solution.

Step 2 – Know your cost vs. value

It’s usually the elephant in the room. Cost is definitely a deal maker or deal breaker when it comes to hiring an agency.

As with everything else you purchase, the phrase “you get what you pay for” rings true in the world of web design and development. If you begin to cut costs solely for saving a dollar now, you may not reap as much value in the long-term when it comes to delivering the results you planned for in step one.

So how can you justify the costs of your project? It’s simple math really. This is where you as a business owner stops to do some research. What have you spent in the last year on your marketing and advertising? The past five years? How have those efforts brought a return on your investment?

What to do? Ask your agency if they can provide clear evidence of the value delivered through tangible results. Remember it’s about value, not cost. If the agency can provide a website or service that brings ROI, then cost isn’t a deal breaker. Don’t let sticker shock blind you from your goals in step one, if you do your research you may find that you’ve been spending money elsewhere without results for quite some time.

Step 3 – Identify a solid track record

This is not necessarily how long an agency has been in business. In fact, a lot of new agencies have some stellar ideas and new methodologies to consider. The point here is how much the agency understands your industry and have they effectively delivered a similar solution to their other clients?

What to do? Ask the agency for some performance data, client testimonials and a case study or two demonstrating their approach and how they measure results.

Step 4 – Communicate and learn

The ever-changing web makes it a highly complex and technically challenging monster even for us who are living and breathing it every day. So it is highly important that you understand what your web agency is talking about and doing.

When you enter into a discussion with them, they should be on your side, working hard to explain what they do, how they do it and most importantly why they are doing it. If you are ever confused or lost by any part of the discussion, it’s not your fault… it’s theirs.

What to do? Ask the agency questions about their process, their methodologies and why they are making certain recommendations or decisions. If you don’t understand a component of the web project, ask. True, it is up to you do your own research, but you should never feel like you’re in the dark about your investment.

Step 5 – Recognize content is your problem

You no doubt have come up with your own reasons for either a makeover or a re-launch of a new site. Most often, the first thing that comes to mind is how your website looks and functions. These are of course important factors, but the most important factor that is most likely overlooked is your content.

If your agency tackles art before content, you’re in the wrong place working with the wrong folks. They are simply putting lipstick on a pig.

Your agency needs to dig deep, they need to be asking the right questions about your customers, your business and your industry. If they are not, red flags should be going up and you should be headed for the door.

Even though this is step five, it is honestly the most important aspect to consider when choosing an agency. The agency needs to know the importance of content first. Whether they create the content or receive from a copywriter, they are building the framework that is housing your content. They need to understand how your users will interact with the content and how you specifically will manage the content in the future. This ensures that your website is delivering your message and maintains its quality for years to come.

What to do? Use your content to help your customers. Content is everything from your written copy to your images and videos and more. Your web agency should be talking content before art. If anything, they should be in touch with your marketing team or copywriters if they are not creating the content themselves.

Step 6 – Know what you want to achieve, be realistic

Invest some time and thought into your goals and expectations from your agency. Define what it is in six months or a year’s time that will reassure you that your money was well spent.

Think beyond “first on Google” or “getting more traffic”.

What are some goals you can reach?

• Generate more leads
• Increase online sales
• Improve product or brand awareness
• Be “in touch” with your customer base

What to do? Ask your web agency what tools and services they provide to drive measurable traffic to your site. Your agency should understand your sales process so that they can provide a solution to making your process more efficient and provide real value through the new website.

Step 7 – Know your strategy

A good web agency should be offering you a clear concise web strategy. This goes beyond your website.  A good strategy will give your business a strong sense of authority, relevance and trust. When you’ve got a solid plan, your able to measure. When you measure you’re able to make good decisions based on real data. This results in converting your site visitors into paying customers.

What to do? Ask your agency to explain their approach in great detail. Make sure the strategy is able to reach your goals in step one. The approach should outline that you will reach your deadline and stay within budget.

Step 8 – Maintain the quality of your investment

After launch of your new site, a good agency will maintain a healthy relationship with you. Depending on how involved you are with the maintenance and publishing of content, a good agency will assist you in your analytic reporting and ensure that your website is helping you reach your goals.

What to do? Ask your web agency to about their existing ongoing relationships. How are they assisting other clients? Do they have ongoing maintenance or service plans on a monthly or quarterly basis that you can sign up for?

Ready to discuss your next project? Contact us today at +92-21 -36631285 or email us at Info@hexa-tech.org and find out how we at Press Enter measure up to our list above.

SEO is one of the most misunderstood and misinterpreted terms in the world of marketing. That’s right, folks: I said marketing. While SEO has been painted as some sort of black-magic secret that requires an internet illuminati membership to learn the ways of, at its core, it is a marketing method. SEO’s unfair characterization as a kind of alchemy over the past decade has caused many otherwise savvy business people to devalue its importance as part of a good, solid marketing plan for small, mid-sized, and large businesses.

I find this extremely unfortunate, because SEO is a very viable marketing outlet that can, in concert with effective landing pages and content, bring your business qualified leads and customers. Moreover, studies have shown that SEO can have a better ROI than traditional forms of marketing like TV and print ads. It isn’t magic, and SEO alone is not going to transform your business from a shop in your parents’ basement to a Fortune 500 company. But neither is any other single form of advertising. What it can do is provide a business visibility, branding, traffic, a high ROI, credibility, and insight into customer behavior. Let’s discuss each of these in turn.

SEO is Good for Business Visibility and Branding

When people search for your products and services, you obviously want to appear as high in the search engine rankings as possible, but the reasons for this are more than just because you want them to click through to your website. In fact, there is a certain amount of value in simply appearing in search results for terms directly related to your business. For instance, most searchers don’t just simply search once, click on some websites, and be done with it. Instead, they search, click on some websites, edit their search terms, search again, click on some websites, further hone their search terms, search again, and so on.

So what does this mean for your business? It means that if you can continually show in all these search results that you are gaining more and more mindshare with each potential customer. Chances are very good that they will eventually click through to your website, and since you continually displayed in all their search results, they will trust you that much more. Which brings us to the next reason why SEO is important for your business.

SEO Provides Your Business Credibility

Searchers make mental notes of the rankings for the terms they enter into Google and other search engines. They may not realize it, but they do. And in the minds of consumers, your ranking is a vote of confidence — “Google says this business is relevant, so that must be the case.” This may sound a bit far-fetched, but let’s look at it like this: back in the golden age of the yellow pages, if you were looking for a plumber, did you feel more confident in calling the guy on the seventh page of the listings, or did you, like most people, start from the first page and work your way through? Your customers may not admit it, but high search rankings makes you more credible in their eyes.

SEO Brings Your Business Traffic

Sure, by itself, traffic is not going to make you any money. But would you rather set up your storefront on a backstreet in Davenport, Iowa or right in the middle of Times Square? All those people walking around in Times Square day and night by themselves aren’t going to make you any money, but chances are that quite a few of them will eventually become your customers. Just like Times Square, you still have to make your best effort to sell to your customers once they are on your website, but it’s better to do business on a crowded street corner than it is to set up shop on a deserted island. What’s better is that SEO is usually a good deal more affordable than store leases in Times Square.

SEO Has One of the Best ROI’s in Advertising

SEO rewards your business for its efforts at a higher rate than pretty much all traditional forms of offline advertising — the same can be said for almost all types of internet marketing. The reason for this is because SEO is an inbound marketing strategy; that is, it allows you to market to people when they are looking for the products and services your business provides. You don’t have to interrupt their favorite TV show, you don’t have to take up space on a page where they are reading a news article. You just show up when they are looking for businesses like yours. You don’t have to convince them they need your product or service; you just have to convince them that you are the right business to purchase from. In other words, with SEO, half the battle is won before it even starts.

SEO Gives You Unmatched Insight Into Your Customers

As I already stated, SEO generates valuable traffic. Google Analytics tracks this traffic. Google Analytics is an amazing tool. As  our President and CEO, said today: “it provides more data and metrics than you can shake a stick at.” The data and metrics are valuable because they give you insight into your customers: how they search, how they browse, the language they use, the technology they use, the region they live in, the days they are most active, the times of day they are most active, you name it. This is extremely valuable because it can help you make more informed decisions regarding your business and its strategies, both online and offline.

What other values would you say SEO has for businesses?  if you are ready to get started with SEO for your business, give us a call at +922136631285 or email me at info@hexa-tech.org

Expect to hear a whole lot more about Li-Fi – a wireless technology that transmits high-speed data using visible light communication (VLC) – in the coming months. With scientists achieving speeds of 224 gigabits per second in the lab using Li-Fi earlier this year, the potential for this technology to change everything about the way we use the Internet is huge.

And now, scientists have taken Li-Fi out of the lab for the first time, trailing it in offices and industrial environments in Tallinn, Estonia, reporting that they can achieve data transmission at 1 GB per second – that’s 100 times faster than current average Wi-Fi speeds.

“We are doing a few pilot projects within different industries where we can utilize the VLC (visible light communication) technology,” Deepak Solanki, CEO of Estonian tech company, Velmenni, told IBTimes UK.

“Currently we have designed a smart lighting solution for an industrial environment where the data communication is done through light. We are also doing a pilot project with a private client where we are setting up a Li-Fi network to access the Internet in their office space.”

Li-Fi was invented by Harald Haas from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland back in 2011, when he demonstrated for the first time that by flickering the light from a single LED, he could transmit far more data than a cellular tower. Think back to that lab-based record of 224 gigabits per second – that’s 18 movies of 1.5 GB each being downloaded every single second.

The technology uses Visible Light Communication (VLC), a medium that uses visible light between 400 and 800 terahertz (THz). It works basically like an incredibly advanced form of Morse code – just like switching a torch on and off according to a certain pattern can relay a secret message, flicking an LED on and off at extreme speeds can be used to write and transmit things in binary code.

And while you might be worried about how all that flickering in an office environment would drive you crazy, don’t worry – we’re talking LEDs that can be switched on and off at speeds imperceptible to the naked eye.

The benefits of Li-Fi over Wi-Fi, other than potentially much faster speeds, is that because light cannot pass through walls, it makes it a whole lot more secure, and as Anthony Cuthbertson points out at IBTimes UK, this also means there’s less interference between devices.

While Cuthbertson says Li-Fi will probably not completely replace Wi-Fi in the coming decades, the two technologies could be used together to achieve more efficient and secure networks.

Our homes, offices, and industry buildings have already been fitted with infrastructure to provide Wi-Fi, and ripping all of this out to replace it with Li-Fi technology isn’t particularly feasible, so the idea is to retrofit the devices we have right now to work with Li-Fi technology.

Research teams around the world are working on just that. Li-Fi experts reported for the The Conversation last month that Haas and his team have launched Pure LiFi, a company that offers a plug-and-play application for secure wireless Internet access with a capacity of 11.5 MB per second, which is comparable to first generation Wi-Fi. And French tech company Oledcomm is in the process of installing its own Li-Fi technology in local hospitals.

If applications like these and the Velmenni trial in Estonia prove successful, we could achieve the dream outlined by Haas in his 2011 TED talk below – everyone gaining access to the Internet via LED light bulbs in their home.

“All we need to do is fit a small microchip to every potential illumination device and this would then combine two basic functionalities: illumination and wireless data transmission,” Haas said. “In the future we will not only have 14 billion light bulbs, we may have 14 billion Li-Fis deployed worldwide for a cleaner, greener, and even brighter future.”

When it comes to closed circuit television or CCTV systems, there are lots of different brands and types of systems to choose from. I am going to cover the differences between standard analog systems and HDCVI or High Definition Composite Video Interface (analog’s replacement in the near future). For the price of a high-end analog CCTV system, you can get an HDCVI system that will knock your socks off!

Analog Closed Circuit Television System

Analog camera systems are the vast majority of camera systems on the market that are in use by the typical surveillance consumer. The best way that I can describe what the footage from these cameras looks like is the typical 7-11 robbery video that you see on the nightly news. With a standard analog camera system, the highest resolution you will get is 960h or 928×480 and most will only produce a standard D1 resolution of 704×480 or essentially 480i. This is equivalent to what television stations broadcast up until June of 2009. After the transition, all “full-power TV Stations” went into broadcasting HD. One of the best examples of the quality of the new transmission is before the change all the news personalities never had to worry too much about their complexion, after the change you could see the pores on these people and the makeup artists had to start working overtime to deal with the added details in their clients.

With a traditional closed circuit camera system, you will typically have a DVR (Digital Video Recorder) for encoding and storing of the video. A cable from the DVR location to the camera location, typically either a plug-and-play premature cable or a Siamese cable; there also could be an Ethernet cable with baluns used as well. A balun simply converts an Ethernet cable to a standard BNC connection; some can also send power and audio over the same Ethernet cable. A power supply is needed to power the camera from the DVR location. A camera with a BNC connector on it typically is under 700TVL or 700 TV lines.

Some of the higher end analog systems have great picture quality and are suitable for some people on the market, but with the fact that as a society, we have grown to expect better definition on any image or video we see. Over time, we will look back on analog camera systems the way we look back at vintage footage.

HDCVI Closed Circuit Television System

Now you are probably wondering what the heck, another acronym in the security industry! HDCVI actually stands for High Definition Composite Video Interface, but think of it as high definition over any cable type. With HDCVI you will currently be able to get 720p high definition video, with 1080p resolution video in the very near future. While you can technically run HDCVI over any existing security camera cabling that has copper in it, the better the cable the better the results you will see. Let me explain that a little further. To receive the absolute best picture out your HDCVI system you should use either RG59 or RG6 Siamese cable. With most RG59 and RG6 cables on the market, they have more copper in them than most other cable types, and the shielding that surrounds the core helps to prevent interference from outside sources. The next best cabling method would be Ethernet cable (Cat5e/Cat6), preferably a high quality, with baluns. This is because with all the options of cabling this is the second best cable as far as copper content. You can use standard Plug and Play BNC cables, but keep in mind that the better the cable the better the video.

With HDCVI camera systems, you do get the same truly closed circuit television system that you are used to with an analog system, unlike what you get with an IP megapixel camera system. What that means is that all the cameras come directly back to the DVR (Digital Video Recorder) which is where the video is encoded and stored on the internal hard disk drive. This isolates the cameras from the network unless you have the unit connected to the network. Even when the system is connected to the network, it is protected by a three failed attempt lockout. What that means is that even if someone finds the system, if they fail three times on guessing the password, the system locks the account from access and continues to keep on operating as normal. It just helps to prevent unauthorized access to your surveillance system. With the fact that the DVR is doing all of the encoding, this helps to prevent lag in the video. What that means is that what you are truly looking at is what is going on in real time and not having the second or so delay from the live shot to what you are seeing. This is typically a downfall in an IP megapixel camera system. Another advantage of HDCVI camera systems are that all the OSD (On Screen Display), PTZ (Pan Tilt Zoom) control, and audio can be transmitted over the single coaxial cable that is also sending the video from the camera to the DVR.

In conclusion, if you are looking for a new security system, you can go with different options. You can go the traditional analog camera system route and have it be obsolete in a year or so. You can go with an HD-SDI (High Definition – Serial Digital Interface) camera system, which will give you some temporary benefits over HDCVI right now, but will be obsolete in a few years. You can go with an IP megapixel system that will give you the ability to constantly upgrade over the years. Alternatively, you can go with an HDCVI system which has some minimal limitations on the resolution at the time being, but this is the technology that will wipe analog and HD-SDI camera systems off the market. The cost of these HDCVI systems are only a few dollars more than a high end analog system.

A comparison of Ruby on Rails (Open Source) vs PHP (Open Source), Performance, Cost, Scalability, Support, and Complexity

First, let’s try to understand why you want to choose a specific technology. All technologies thrive off the community, tooling, libraries and applications. As a business owner, you may want a technology that will last for many years beyond the project’s inception. As a developer, you want a technology that will stay around long enough, so you can get a return on investment. Business owners or developers will often base their decisions on their colleagues and community depending on which technologies are highly advocated. In this article we will go over the pros and cons of PHP as well as Ruby on Rails. We will touch on how PHP and Ruby on Rails compares with common topics such as scalability, maintenance, performance, costs, and support.

Apples VS Oranges

Comparing PHP to Ruby on Rails is not fair. PHP is far more popular than Ruby on Rails, only because Ruby on Rails is a web framework, not a programming language. Ruby is the language behind the Ruby on Rails framework, and PHP is the language used to write applications. Ruby on Rails is comparable to Zend Framework, Codeigniter, Laravel, Symfony2, CakePHP and many other PHP-based web frameworks. So to understand why there is so much popularity with Ruby on Rails, it’s better to first visualize people’s searches.

This Google Trend graph shows that all PHP web frameworks still do not amount to the number of searches performed for Ruby on Rails (in blue). In fact the only web framework that is growing in the PHP world is Laravel. So then why is Ruby on Rails so popular?

Well, a big part of building a web application is deciding what libraries you will use, how to organize your application, and many other factors. To date, many PHP projects still do not use a mature, proven web framework. Many PHP developers would rather create a new PHP framework, rather than use the popular frameworks such as Zend Framework, Symfony2, etc. due to the complexity of an application, as with any frameworks you’ll spend a lot of time learning how to use it. Thus, Ruby on Rails tries to simplify the learning process of its framework by utilizing conventions over configuration — in other words, you (the developer or business owner) have little to decide on when it comes to running, organizing or even hosting the application.

This may seem like a good thing, and for the most part, it truly is, which is why Ruby on Rails is so popular. However since then, many PHP web frameworks have recognized this, and are following the developmental steps of Ruby on Rails. This could be why the Ruby on Rails’ community growth has stagnated in the past few years. Now while the other web frameworks are shown as a small percentage, you’ll still need to keep in mind that PHP is web focused. So just about everything you write in PHP will run on the web, while in Ruby, you will have little choice what code you can write to develop a web application.

Scalability and Ease of Maintenance

Whether it is PHP or Ruby on Rails, both have the ability to scale. However, because of the amount of resources Ruby uses versus PHP, scalability issues will arise much earlier in your application’s life cycle. Scaling an application in Ruby on Rails versus PHP will touch on very common issues. Thus scaling will be based on how the application was designed. There are also services online to help resolve scaling issues such as using Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, or Rackspace Cloud Sites. The situation becomes very different when you go from wanting to scale, to needing to scale. When a developer does not have the experience to scale an application, then the most common route is to find online articles, tutorials and other resources to learn. So when it comes to scaling a website, there are plenty of resources written for PHP developers while Ruby on Rails has a much smaller pool of information.

As far as ease of maintenance, this depends on the organization of the application. As long as the developer is using a web framework, then the maintenance overall will become easier. PHP offers a massive selection of web frameworks, all designed for specific goals, while Ruby has a much more limited selection (other than Ruby on Rails).

Performance and Speed

Given that PHP is a language, and Ruby on Rails is a web framework, you’d have to take performance with a grain of salt. The point of using a full web framework is to gain productivity at the expense of speed. So let’s put some perspective on this.

Here is a chart of a very simple “hello world” application. Below you can see just how fast pure PHP is when it comes to requests — remember, it’s a language designed for the web. However, once you start to introduce the popular full stack web frameworks, the performance drops, and the requests per second gets closer to the Ruby on Rails number. In fact, a popular web framework Laravel performs worse than Ruby on Rails. As a result most benchmarks are useless, because there’s so much more to the performance and speed of an application than the language or web framework. For example, the database system, caching mechanisms, and network delays can add a 10x to 100x slow down. So how the application is design is far more important than the language or web framework behind it.

In general, Ruby and PHP are some of the slowest languages to pick from, but Ruby takes more resources than PHP does. With the given performance issues, both languages have taken steps to help reduce the sluggishness that arise in everyday applications. Both languages have several runtimes, their core runtimes, such as MRI for Ruby, and Zend Engine for PHP. Using those runtimes are rather slow compared to other languages. There have been several attempts to resolve these issues. There has been work to run both languages on the JVM, which is what Java uses as its runtime. The reason to run on top of the JVM, is not only speed, but to also utilize everything Java has to offer. However just because they run on the JVM doesn’t guarantee a faster application. There are things on the JVM that run slower. So if you need your application running as fast as possible then there is also Rubinius for Ruby and HHVM for PHP which are designed to run your applications faster, at the expense of limited platform support. For example Rubinius and HHVM do not support Windows. They do not support everything the core run times provide, thus you’ll have to change certain parts of your application to ensure it can run on these high performance run times.

Cost

Scarcity is a fundamental concept of economics. So if you have ten PHP developers for every one Ruby developer, and the role of the project depends on the language, than there will be a clear winner in costs. PHP, due to its heavy competition, has lower prices. As a business owner, if your motive is based on costs then this should be a very helpful incentive. There is the saying, “You get what you pay for”, but it doesn’t mean you have to pay the same amount for the experience on hand. PHP has a very easy learning curve. On top of that many PHP developers are new to programming in general and programming web applications in particular.

On the other hand, Ruby is a harder language to learn, so people who do choose that language already know how to program. It’s very natural to have a PHP developer move to Ruby on Rails, and their experience in the PHP world transfer to Ruby. In fact many Ruby developers were once PHP developers. So why would developers jump to Ruby on Rails? Well this answer would be the same for almost every other programming language other than PHP. In every other language (except PHP) the language will limit you on the code you can write, as well as what is available to use. Thus there becomes a common method of building web applications in that language. For example, C# has ASP.NET, Python has Django, Node.js has Express, Lua has Orbit, and the list goes on. So to put this in perspective, let’s say you had the choice to engage with a massive audience, or be among select professionals that share the same goals. It would make sense that the most renowned applications should be built on the languages that have the largest audience, therefore PHP is the target language. Applications like WordPress, Drupal, Magento, Facebook, are just a tiny fraction of the many applications available, which are written in PHP.

When it comes to hosting your Ruby on Rails applications, the costs can go up very quickly. You will have a harder time finding hosting that supports a Ruby on Rails application, and the big brand names are not cheap. They start at $40, and quickly jump to $500 or more. There are even some companies that provide free hosting, but will charge a lot of fees when needing to expand your hosting needs. Almost all hosting companies that provide Ruby on Rails hosting will also provide PHP hosting as well. Some of the cheaper hosting providers provide old, outdated versions of Ruby (the language), thus limiting you to older versions of Ruby on Rails. They also run your Ruby on Rails application as CGI which is the slowest way to run your web application.

 Support And Resources

PHP has a very large pool of developers and online resources. Ruby on Rails also offers many resources online, but there are a far more resources available for PHP. However, many resources you will find for both PHP and Ruby on Rails, are often out of date or wrong. This is the nature of relying on the Internet for resources. There have been initiatives in both communities to create definitive guides. For example, PHP has phptherightway.com, which will help newcomers avoid common pitfalls, such as security, installation, multilingual, coding practices, testing, etc. While Ruby has a large selection of podcasts, and professional video content.

There are also websites like stackoverflow that provide more up-to-date resources. On stackoverflow.com, for every Ruby on Rails question, there are five PHP questions. The most voted question have 480 votes for Ruby on Rails while PHP’s most voted question has 2660 votes. One odd aspect is that there seem to be many more questions about Ruby on Rails then Ruby the language. There are also odd revelations in Ruby on Rails, as it’s more about the movement then the language or code.

In fact, its oddity has gained so much traction, that Ruby on Rails has special niche communities such as railsgirls.com, which is a website designed to help women create online applications. They go around the world encouraging females to get involved in technology. On the PHP side there is also phpwoman.com, which has been around for over 7 years, but lack the viral traction that railsgirls.com produced. And that’s the thing to remember, so much of Ruby on Rails’s fame is spawned from the community, by starting off with very dedicated individuals, it has created something that has such a strong market value. It doesn’t matter that it is slow, or that there are solutions that are better, people see and want to become a part of the community.

 Time To Deploy

Both languages feature fast development times, due to being an interpreted language. For Ruby on Rails there was the famous video, “Create a Blog in 15 Minutes”, which attracted many web developers from all languages. That video set the bar on what a web framework needs to do, in order to rapidly build applications. Since then, subsequent videos have been produced in other languages and frameworks, like creating a blog in 20 minutes with PHP CodeIgniter. Another thing Ruby on Rails is known for is scaffolding. Scaffolding is the process of generating code based on some known parameters. Scaffolding is a very powerful tool to help get your application to market. FuelPHP provides a lot of similar functionalities that Ruby on Rails scaffolding provides.

 Editors And Tools

This is an area where PHP outpaces Ruby on Rails. PHP offers a large array of editors and tools. When it comes to benchmarking, profiling, and debugging, PHP succeeds in just having more options. It is wrong to assume that there is something that Ruby on Rails can do, that PHP cannot do. However there are things that both do well, and both don’t do as well, or may not be accomplished as easily.

Most of the concern about PHP’s limits are related to hosting costs. For example, to do certain things in PHP you need an extension, called a pecl. Many shared hosts will have a handful of these installed, but you cannot install your own. Thus if you did want to install your own you’d have to rely on a Virtual Private Server, Cloud Server, or Dedicated Server, which are just as expensive as Ruby on Rails hosting as it needs the same requirements. So most PHP software that comes from the PHP community must rely on older language features and crippled functionality as they are designed to run in shared-hosting environments.

 BACKGROUND TASKS

A background task is something many applications will want to perform, in order to preserve the user experience by providing a quick response time. They are certain things that could take a very long time to complete. For example if your user tried to delete a large amount of data, the application may want to run that as a background task, and this way the user doesn’t need to wait for that action to complete. There are also different ways to have a background task run. You have threads, which may or may not be a good idea, as you could lock up your entire application. There are also asynchronous tasks, which run but are delayed or may run small parts of the operation at a time. The other solutions include running a task on a different process, server or groups of servers.

For Ruby on Rails, you have Threads out of the box, but there are a plethora of Gems (libraries) to consider that are designed to work with Ruby on Rails. Workling, Starling, Resque, and many others will help you design your application so that you can run a long process, say something like an email, calculation, or even a scheduled task.

However for PHP, the picture is very different. There is an extension called pthread, but it is not designed for a “fire and forget”-type of task, such as an email. Instead you are forced to make a few decisions, which you could do in Ruby on Rails as well. First is to design your application correctly to work alongside a task management system. For example, Gearman is a language-agnostic framework for processing jobs. It hooks into every language and all your application needs to do is communicate to it with a workload, such as an email.

So while background tasks may be really easy in Ruby on Rails, they generally lead to bad performance, or applications that cannot scale. The eventual solution many developers choose is something like Gearman (which can also be used in Ruby on Rails). This just leads to the point of how easy it is to delay a complicated piece of your application onto a later stage, when it does become an issue. The other option in PHP is to keep firing a request to the webserver, and that request will check for a task to do. This is normally run by a time based job scheduler, such as a cron, chronos, launchd, cronie, etc. Time based job schedulers are used the most when it comes to PHP applications.

TEMPLATE ENGINES

A template engine is a way to create and reuse user interfaces based on dynamic data driven information. There are more than 50 template engines in PHP, not including the fact that you can use PHP as a template engine. On the other hand Ruby only has several useful template engines. In the context of Ruby on Rails, there are only 2-3 template engines that would work well with that framework.

 Closing

So, just remember there is a lot to consider when building an application and if there is really anything to take away from this article, it’s not that either is a poor solution, it’s just that the language is least of your worries. Here is a quick summary of items you can reference: