5 ms·

People will crucify me for saying this but had they choose PHP instead of Rails, these folks would have had a better luck. I don't know any really popular web/C

by aikah 12y ago

People will crucify me for saying this but had they choose PHP instead of Rails, these folks would have had a better luck. I don't know any really popular web/CMS/project that is not written in PHP. Well I know some but they all are commercial Java CMSs. The only exception I know is a CRM/ERP built with Python. Edit: i'm obviously talking about open source plateform.

maelito 12y ago
https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/ ?
garretraziel 12y ago
I don't think that RoR is the cause of Diaspora's failure. And in my opinion, saying this sounds a little bit like cargo culting.
- tajen 12y ago
  Diaspora also uses Mongodb... At least I'm one person who was repelled from installing Diaspora because of its prerequisites. And I say that as someone who started programming when I was 7.
  - mnutt 12y ago
    They migrated to a relational database about 4 years ago: http://www.slideshare.net/sarahmei/taking-diaspora-from-mongodb-to-mysql-rubyconf-2011 http://www.slideshare.net/sarahmei/taking-diaspora-from-mong...
mgkimsal 12y ago
I agree with you 110%. pencilblue.org is a node CMS I just read about today, but... in general, for wide adoption, PHP is still king, and even 3 years ago, it was pretty easy to predict it would be king in 2015. I'll even predict its kingship for another 2-3 years. containerization and virtualization may play a part in its downfall over the next 2-5 years, but PHP will remain one of the major widely deployed systems for a long time (and PHP7 will likely strengthen that hold).
tremendo 12y ago
I am confused. What does Diaspora have to do with popular Content Management Systems? I thought it was about de-centralized social networking. Well sure, Facebook uses PHP, and Twitter got going with Rails, but this comment seems out of place.
- aikah 12y ago
  I'm talking about opensource web projects in general, like Wordpress,Magento,Drupal,Piwik and many many others.I'm not talking about how one can build something in language X or Y but about open source webapps.
JoshTriplett 12y ago
> I don't know any really popular web/CMS/project that is not written in PHP. You need to significantly update your knowledge of the current state of web tools, then. All the world isn't Wordpress and Drupal.
- junto 12y ago
  No it isn't, but for the vast majority of users, it is their first call because their hosting providers provide cpanel or similar with app installers (i.e. Fantastico) and the vast majority of those apps are going to have been written in PHP: https://netenberg.com/fantastico.php#fantastico-scripts.html https://netenberg.com/fantastico.php#fantastico-scripts.html The OP genuinely ha a good point. Diaspora needs to be as easy to install as Wordpress and as ubiquitous, and then it would gain real adoption. Sad, but true. Check out the Diaspora install instructions for Ubuntu: https://netenberg.com/fantastico.php#fantastico-scripts.html https://netenberg.com/fantastico.php#fantastico-scripts.html It starts off with: The install is a bit complex, but we're here to help. It's extremely helpful to have some experience in Linux/Unix server administration or Rails app deployment already. But don't worry, if you run into problems and need help, just visit us in our IRC channels on Freenode. If Diaspora wants a chance to win against Facebook then this is a shitty way to get users on board.
  - JoshTriplett 12y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9484757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9484757
nightpool 12y ago
??? I think there are a lot of really popular applications that aren't written in PHP. In fact, excluding Facebook and Mediawiki, I can't think of anything I would classify as "popular" that is written in PHP. (Not sure whether to count PHPBB or not, seeing as although none of the sites hosted on it get a ton of traffic, cumulatively it must be one of the most popular pieces of web software ever) Rails, specifically has Github, Twitter, Basecamp, and Discourse, just off the top of my head.
- aikah 12y ago
  Neither Github nor Twitter nor Basecamp are opensource. Now I know Discourse, I don't think it's really popular as a "forum" plateform.
- digitalzombie 12y ago
  Etsy & Slickdeal are in PHP.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- gboone42 12y ago
  WordPress is PHP, and licensed GPL, too. Last I heard roughly 20% of the web was running it.
  - bdcravens 12y ago
    That's interesting, because Matt Mullenweg, one of Wordpress's cofounders and original author, said that if he rewrote Wordpress today, he'd choose Go: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1jg781/i_am_matt_mullenweg_cofounder_of_wordpress_18_of/cbed1jk https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1jg781/i_am_matt_mull...
    - kijin 12y ago
      WordPress written in Go might be okay for the hosted version at WordPress.com, but it would have a lot of difficulty achieving the kind of market share that the self-hosted PHP version enjoys. I can't imagine Dreamhost et al. being happy with people recompiling WordPress Go on their platforms all the time.
matthewmacleod 12y ago
I think you'll be crucified because it's a bit of a weird conclusion to draw. PHP was popular for ages, and loads of great things were built on top of it. With modern development practices and improvements in the language, it's even possible to build better tools using it. But it's not like it's easier to build excellent tools than any of the other environments available – Rails, or Django, or Play, or whatever. I don't think the development toolset would have any impact on the success or otherwise of the project, at the end of the day. Sure, maybe it would be a problem if it were some rarely-used, obscure system, but that hardly applies to Rails.
- smacktoward 12y ago
  I don't think it's particularly weird, if you phrase it slightly differently: PHP is a better choice for web software that users are expected to host themselves. Using PHP lets your users tap into the absolutely ginormous ecosystem of PHP hosting providers out there, and makes deployment dead simple ("FTP these files to that place, now you're done"). No other platform makes these steps as simple and inexpensive as PHP does. If you're writing an app that you're going to host for the users, it doesn't matter much what you write it in. If you're writing an app that users are going to host for themselves, it matters a lot.
- aikah 12y ago
  > I don't think the development toolset would have any impact on the success or otherwise of the project I think it does if you expect people to install that project.
  - kentonv 12y ago
    FWIW, we're trying to fix this with https://sandstorm.io https://sandstorm.io. Try https://demo.sandstorm.io https://demo.sandstorm.io -- apps in many different frameworks, all equally trivial to install. :) (We'll have Diaspora on there soon...)
    - woah 12y ago
      If everybody hosted their diaspora nodes with you... Would that be centralization?
digitalzombie 12y ago
Stack overflow is popular and it's C# IIRC. I think PHP in general is popular because it's made for web and very easy to get started. This has cause a disproportional market share where the bulk of the popular site, cms, project are PHP. But that doesn't necessarily means other languages can't compete, it just mean PHP have a good market share. Another arguably popular website is OkCupid and that was coded in C++. I also think PHP will stay popular because of Facebook. They have contributed to several important projects including a pretty good VM and there are a resurgent of momentum imo. Most of it are copying what RoR group have pioneer.
- aikah 12y ago
  Stack overflow isn't an opensource plateform like Diaspora. You could talk about Umbraco and such that are popular in the .NET space but you can't really compare SO and Diaspora.
  - digitalzombie 12y ago
    Oh I thought your point was popular web projects in general. So to clarify, you're comparing Diaspora an open source p2p social media platform that is written in Ruby/Ember to what now?
    - aikah 12y ago
      > So to clarify, you're comparing Diaspora an open source p2p social media platform that is written in Ruby/Ember to what now? I don't know any popular p2p social plateform written in PHP. All I know is the one written with Rails isn't as popular as it should have been.
frik 12y ago
I don't understand the down votes. In 2010 Facebook and Ruby on Rails were both still hot, so it's understandable that they chooce Rails. But, and that's the big "but" that not everyone understands: Hosting a Rails site wasn't that easy in 2010 than it is today. AWS and specialized hosting providers where rather new, and most normal people still used (crappy) hosters that only supported CGI and PHP4/5. We are talking about a web software that should be easy to run on many servers, and PHP5 would have been definitely a better choice back then. Installing a PHP based software is a no-brainer, simply download&extract the zip archive in the www/htdocs dir. In the age of shared hosting and before the advent of language package managers, this was a big benefit. The biggest problem with Diaspora was that it was a big fluff, a great idea with a big media coverage - but it took the developers 2 years to get the software to beta status (2012): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(software) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(software), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network). A sad remark, one of the developers died: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Zhitomirskiy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Zhitomirskiy
giaour 12y ago
Weren't they targeting the same user base as Wordpress? I thought the goal was to get social networking as decentralized as blogging. It isn't hard to host a Rails app, but it's certainly harder than hosting one in PHP. Especially if you have little or no technical expertise or aren't willing to pay for anything more than shared hosting.
bdcravens 12y ago
Discourse is written in Rails. Canvas, a popular learning management system, is also written in Rails. So is your point that velocity was held back due to lack of contribution? They have 300+ contributors; I'm uncertain that they'd get more if it was in PHP, and one could argue development would move slower. By your logic, ColdFusion (or an open source variant like Railo) would have been a better choice, given the many CMSes and other open source project written in CFML (MangoBlog, blogCFC, ContentBox, Mura, etc). Heck, another vote for it would be the fact that MySpace was originally written in CF. Personally, I find the whole language thing to be comparable to saying a restaurant failed because they offered Pepsi instead of Coke.
dugmartin 12y ago
I always thought a distributed/federated social network built as a WordPress plugin/theme would have the best chance of adoption. I haven't looked at BuddyPress in a while to see if they have gone anywhere in this direction.
- tacone 12y ago
  I had the same thought.

by aikah 12y ago

maelito 12y ago

https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/ ?

garretraziel 12y ago

I don't think that RoR is the cause of Diaspora's failure. And in my opinion, saying this sounds a little bit like cargo culting.

tajen 12y ago
Diaspora also uses Mongodb... At least I'm one person who was repelled from installing Diaspora because of its prerequisites. And I say that as someone who started programming when I was 7.
- mnutt 12y ago
  They migrated to a relational database about 4 years ago: http://www.slideshare.net/sarahmei/taking-diaspora-from-mongodb-to-mysql-rubyconf-2011 http://www.slideshare.net/sarahmei/taking-diaspora-from-mong...

mgkimsal 12y ago

I agree with you 110%. pencilblue.org is a node CMS I just read about today, but... in general, for wide adoption, PHP is still king, and even 3 years ago, it was pretty easy to predict it would be king in 2015. I'll even predict its kingship for another 2-3 years. containerization and virtualization may play a part in its downfall over the next 2-5 years, but PHP will remain one of the major widely deployed systems for a long time (and PHP7 will likely strengthen that hold).

tremendo 12y ago

I am confused. What does Diaspora have to do with popular Content Management Systems? I thought it was about de-centralized social networking. Well sure, Facebook uses PHP, and Twitter got going with Rails, but this comment seems out of place.

aikah 12y ago
I'm talking about opensource web projects in general, like Wordpress,Magento,Drupal,Piwik and many many others.I'm not talking about how one can build something in language X or Y but about open source webapps.

JoshTriplett 12y ago

> I don't know any really popular web/CMS/project that is not written in PHP. You need to significantly update your knowledge of the current state of web tools, then. All the world isn't Wordpress and Drupal.

junto 12y ago
No it isn't, but for the vast majority of users, it is their first call because their hosting providers provide cpanel or similar with app installers (i.e. Fantastico) and the vast majority of those apps are going to have been written in PHP: https://netenberg.com/fantastico.php#fantastico-scripts.html https://netenberg.com/fantastico.php#fantastico-scripts.html The OP genuinely ha a good point. Diaspora needs to be as easy to install as Wordpress and as ubiquitous, and then it would gain real adoption. Sad, but true. Check out the Diaspora install instructions for Ubuntu: https://netenberg.com/fantastico.php#fantastico-scripts.html https://netenberg.com/fantastico.php#fantastico-scripts.html It starts off with: The install is a bit complex, but we're here to help. It's extremely helpful to have some experience in Linux/Unix server administration or Rails app deployment already. But don't worry, if you run into problems and need help, just visit us in our IRC channels on Freenode. If Diaspora wants a chance to win against Facebook then this is a shitty way to get users on board.
- JoshTriplett 12y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9484757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9484757

nightpool 12y ago

??? I think there are a lot of really popular applications that aren't written in PHP. In fact, excluding Facebook and Mediawiki, I can't think of anything I would classify as "popular" that is written in PHP. (Not sure whether to count PHPBB or not, seeing as although none of the sites hosted on it get a ton of traffic, cumulatively it must be one of the most popular pieces of web software ever) Rails, specifically has Github, Twitter, Basecamp, and Discourse, just off the top of my head.

aikah 12y ago
Neither Github nor Twitter nor Basecamp are opensource. Now I know Discourse, I don't think it's really popular as a "forum" plateform.
digitalzombie 12y ago
Etsy & Slickdeal are in PHP.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
gboone42 12y ago
WordPress is PHP, and licensed GPL, too. Last I heard roughly 20% of the web was running it.
- bdcravens 12y ago
  That's interesting, because Matt Mullenweg, one of Wordpress's cofounders and original author, said that if he rewrote Wordpress today, he'd choose Go: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1jg781/i_am_matt_mullenweg_cofounder_of_wordpress_18_of/cbed1jk https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1jg781/i_am_matt_mull...
  - kijin 12y ago
    WordPress written in Go might be okay for the hosted version at WordPress.com, but it would have a lot of difficulty achieving the kind of market share that the self-hosted PHP version enjoys. I can't imagine Dreamhost et al. being happy with people recompiling WordPress Go on their platforms all the time.

matthewmacleod 12y ago

I think you'll be crucified because it's a bit of a weird conclusion to draw. PHP was popular for ages, and loads of great things were built on top of it. With modern development practices and improvements in the language, it's even possible to build better tools using it. But it's not like it's easier to build excellent tools than any of the other environments available – Rails, or Django, or Play, or whatever. I don't think the development toolset would have any impact on the success or otherwise of the project, at the end of the day. Sure, maybe it would be a problem if it were some rarely-used, obscure system, but that hardly applies to Rails.

smacktoward 12y ago
I don't think it's particularly weird, if you phrase it slightly differently: PHP is a better choice for web software that users are expected to host themselves. Using PHP lets your users tap into the absolutely ginormous ecosystem of PHP hosting providers out there, and makes deployment dead simple ("FTP these files to that place, now you're done"). No other platform makes these steps as simple and inexpensive as PHP does. If you're writing an app that you're going to host for the users, it doesn't matter much what you write it in. If you're writing an app that users are going to host for themselves, it matters a lot.
aikah 12y ago
> I don't think the development toolset would have any impact on the success or otherwise of the project I think it does if you expect people to install that project.
- kentonv 12y ago
  FWIW, we're trying to fix this with https://sandstorm.io https://sandstorm.io. Try https://demo.sandstorm.io https://demo.sandstorm.io -- apps in many different frameworks, all equally trivial to install. :) (We'll have Diaspora on there soon...)
  - woah 12y ago
    If everybody hosted their diaspora nodes with you... Would that be centralization?

digitalzombie 12y ago

Stack overflow is popular and it's C# IIRC. I think PHP in general is popular because it's made for web and very easy to get started. This has cause a disproportional market share where the bulk of the popular site, cms, project are PHP. But that doesn't necessarily means other languages can't compete, it just mean PHP have a good market share. Another arguably popular website is OkCupid and that was coded in C++. I also think PHP will stay popular because of Facebook. They have contributed to several important projects including a pretty good VM and there are a resurgent of momentum imo. Most of it are copying what RoR group have pioneer.

aikah 12y ago
Stack overflow isn't an opensource plateform like Diaspora. You could talk about Umbraco and such that are popular in the .NET space but you can't really compare SO and Diaspora.
- digitalzombie 12y ago
  Oh I thought your point was popular web projects in general. So to clarify, you're comparing Diaspora an open source p2p social media platform that is written in Ruby/Ember to what now?
  - aikah 12y ago
    > So to clarify, you're comparing Diaspora an open source p2p social media platform that is written in Ruby/Ember to what now? I don't know any popular p2p social plateform written in PHP. All I know is the one written with Rails isn't as popular as it should have been.

frik 12y ago

I don't understand the down votes. In 2010 Facebook and Ruby on Rails were both still hot, so it's understandable that they chooce Rails. But, and that's the big "but" that not everyone understands: Hosting a Rails site wasn't that easy in 2010 than it is today. AWS and specialized hosting providers where rather new, and most normal people still used (crappy) hosters that only supported CGI and PHP4/5. We are talking about a web software that should be easy to run on many servers, and PHP5 would have been definitely a better choice back then. Installing a PHP based software is a no-brainer, simply download&extract the zip archive in the www/htdocs dir. In the age of shared hosting and before the advent of language package managers, this was a big benefit. The biggest problem with Diaspora was that it was a big fluff, a great idea with a big media coverage - but it took the developers 2 years to get the software to beta status (2012): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(software) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(software), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network). A sad remark, one of the developers died: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Zhitomirskiy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Zhitomirskiy

giaour 12y ago

Weren't they targeting the same user base as Wordpress? I thought the goal was to get social networking as decentralized as blogging. It isn't hard to host a Rails app, but it's certainly harder than hosting one in PHP. Especially if you have little or no technical expertise or aren't willing to pay for anything more than shared hosting.

bdcravens 12y ago

Discourse is written in Rails. Canvas, a popular learning management system, is also written in Rails. So is your point that velocity was held back due to lack of contribution? They have 300+ contributors; I'm uncertain that they'd get more if it was in PHP, and one could argue development would move slower. By your logic, ColdFusion (or an open source variant like Railo) would have been a better choice, given the many CMSes and other open source project written in CFML (MangoBlog, blogCFC, ContentBox, Mura, etc). Heck, another vote for it would be the fact that MySpace was originally written in CF. Personally, I find the whole language thing to be comparable to saying a restaurant failed because they offered Pepsi instead of Coke.

dugmartin 12y ago

I always thought a distributed/federated social network built as a WordPress plugin/theme would have the best chance of adoption. I haven't looked at BuddyPress in a while to see if they have gone anywhere in this direction.

tacone 12y ago
I had the same thought.