August 17, 2009, 8:59 pm
Before the advent of Ruby on Rails, many Web developers worked with Perl or vanilla PHP. Perl’s legacy dated back to the earliest dynamic Web sites. In heady days, the “Perl Mongers” were active proponents and evangelists, and the community nurtured and maintained a vast repository of contributed code. PHP was simple to learn, a snap to deploy and host on virtually any platform, and thus quickly earned a devout following. Indeed, both languages grew popular because it was easy to start an application. However, as Perl and PHP applications grew, developers inevitably became tangled in a mess of code.
Other developers eschewed scripting languages and opted for more heavyweight Web frameworks, especially those written in Java. Applications written in Java were bullet-proof and backed by a rich set of libraries, but were far from perfect, too. Java frameworks exacted a high price, miring developers in the pits of XML hell. While the Java frameworks scaled well, the initial inertia left many Java web developers jealous of the rapid, early progress Perl and PHP developers enjoyed…
