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Ruby vs PHP

By Priya PedamkarPriya Pedamkar

Ruby vs PHP

Differences Between Ruby vs PHP

Ruby is an object-oriented scripting language. It is interpreted programming language used to develop a web application at a high pace. Ruby has very clear syntax, which is easier to understand and write. Ruby is open-source, free of cost and easily available. It can support multiple platforms like Linux, Unix, Windows, and Mac. PHP is an open-source programming language for web development. It supports platforms Unix-like and Windows. PHP filename has extensions like .php, .php3, .php4, .php5, .php7, .phps. PHP also referred to as PHP: Hypertext Pre-processor. The syntax of PHP is similar to the C language.

Ruby

  • Ruby was written in the C language. Ruby has extensions of a file as ‘rb’. Ruby has the features of other scripting languages like Perl, Small talk, and Python. Mainly it has a similar syntax to Perl and C language.
  • Ruby provides a great balance between power and simplicity, as programs written in Ruby are easily maintainable and scalable. There are many libraries that have been written to extend ruby, and it mainly emphasized testing.
  • Ruby has been developed with features like dynamic typing and duck typing, flexible syntax, inheritance, garbage collection, exception handling, overloading, lexical closures, iterators, built-in support, variable scope.
  • Ruby has gain importance via the Rails framework in 2005 for web development. Ruby on Rails can be used to develop interface scripts. Ruby on Rails can be written with HTML language in scripts. Ruby on rails can be easily connected to a database, and inbuilt functions can be used to build ruby scripts.

PHP

  • PHP was created and developed by Rasmus Lerdorf and Zend technologies and released in the year 1995. The last stable release was 7.2.5 in 2018. It was written in C and C++ language. The PHP code can be embedded in HTML language as well and used as a server-side scripting language.
  • It makes the applications more dynamic and simple. It can easily be connected to a database like Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, etc. PHP has used the PHP interpreter to process the code. It can be executed with the help of command-line tools and GUI applications.
  • PHP is very simple, efficient, secure, and flexible. PHP is widely used in small web applications and is more popular than other languages.
  • A blue elephant having a PHP logo represented the PHP mascot. Oops, a concept introduced in PHP 3 and PHP 4 makes the programming easier.

Head to Head Comparison Between Ruby and PHP (Infographics)

Below is the Top 7 comparison between Ruby and PHP:

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Ruby vs PHP Infographics

Key Differences Between Ruby and PHP

Below are the differences between Ruby and PHP:

  1. Ruby does not provide different syntax to access the methods, variables, and properties. PHP provides different syntax to access the same.
  2. In Ruby, statement terminators can be used as Newline terminators; it means a character in the next line. In PHP, the statement terminator is a semicolon.
  3. In Ruby, to concatenate two strings ‘. (dot)’ is used. In PHP, to concatenate, the ‘+’ sign is used.
  4. Ruby does not support integer data types. PHP supports 32 and 64-bit integer data types.
  5. Ruby has strongly typed typing. PHP has weak typing.
  6. Ruby is expressive and readable. PHP is robust and simple
  7. Ruby uses the ‘END’ word to finish the code blocks. In PHP, curly brackets {} are used to end the code blocks.
  8. Ruby use different syntax like to find a length of string it can be written as ‘string.length’. Whereas in PHP, it can be written as ‘strlen($string)’.
  9. Ruby applications are expensive and complex to host and a very time-consuming process. PHP applications are far cheaper and take less time.
  10. Ruby has supported records and complex numbers. But PHP does not support complex numbers and records.
  11. Ruby syntax is easier to understand and grasp. PHP syntax is complex as of its standard library.

Ruby and PHP Comparison Table

Below is the list of points, describe the comparison Between Ruby and PHP:

BASIS FOR

COMPARISON

 Ruby PHP
Programmed Ruby was programmed in C language. PHP was programmed in C and C++ programming language.
Framework Ruby is a programming language, but later on, the Rails framework has been developed. PHP is a Programming language.
Application Ruby/ Rails used to develop desktop applications and web application as well. PHP has been widely used to develop web applications only.
Development In Ruby, development & deployment is difficult compared to PHP. In PHP, development and deployment is easy.
Functions Ruby has to load libraries to get the corresponding function. PHP has inbuilt functions, which make things easier.
Syntax Ruby’s syntax is similar to Perl and Python. PHP syntax is similar to Perl and C language.
Performance Ruby applications are slower than PHP. PHP applications give better performance than Ruby.

Conclusion

Ruby and PHP both are used as general-purpose programming language. These are open-source, free and readily available for the platforms. These are mainly used for web development applications as a server-side scripting language. Ruby and PHP both are dynamically typed, and both Ruby and PHP have the ability to scale.

PHP is stronger in providing consistency, uniform variable syntax, sensitive context, and abstract syntax, which makes the language consistent though there are problems in standard library issues. PHP is simple and easier to learn, and most widely used in the market. PHP has large support in terms of online resources, a good number of template engines and developers, a large array of editors and tools.

Ruby is more powerful than PHP. It has been popular with the Rails framework, which makes the language more versatile and adaptable. Ruby is difficult to learn as compared to PHP. Ruby has a good online community to provide support and becoming popular with developers.

Each language has its own strong areas. While building an application, there are a lot of things that need to be taken care of and to select an appropriate language for developing an application is one of the complicated tasks. Pros and cons of the language are considered for selecting, and most importantly, the performance, scalability, cost, support and maintainability are primary concerns.

Recommended Articles

This has been a useful guide to the Differences Between Ruby vs PHP. Here we discuss head to head comparison, key differences, along with infographics and a comparison table. You may also look at the following articles to learn more –

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