However at the weekend I did decide to really look into RoR as I had been looked into it a little about 18 months ago and I see that it has moved on lots since then.

There are of course more tutorials available now for Rails, however, a lot of them are a bit out of date, and what they tell you to do won’t work any more :(, so you will often find yourself referring to the rails API documentation and figuring stuff out for yourself.

Buy the 2nd edition of “Agile web development with Rails” for what is probably the best overall Rails documentation. The book was only released at the start of ‘07 so it is not massively out of date yet :). “Programming Ruby” is something I would consider an essential companion book as well.

Ultimatly though, it is a decision that only you can make ;)

I have considered looking at RoR, as I really like the look of Ruby (not so bothered about full-stack frameworks such as rails anymore), but I’m not sure if I want to spend the time learning something else new right now on this project. So right now my options are as follows:

1) Stick with CakePHP, which doesn’t seem quite as mature and focused as RoR, and continue with the love-hate relationship with it.
2) Go with Coldfusion, probably via a hosted solution.
3) Look at RoR.

I’ve not looked seriously looked at RoR for about a year so I’m hoping that there are some really solid examples and documentation to get me up and running in a very short time if I go that route.

Still suggest using RoR though ;)

Coldfusion on Linux… well, it eats a hell of a lot of RAM, occaisionally will crash at random intervals. When I was using it, you had to have an officially supported Linux Distribution (IIRC, Redhat or Suse?), otherwise technical support not available. Not recommended for a Linux novice.

Then there is the cost. WHY spend thousands on licences and support contracts etc when there are better open-source products on the market these days?

It is harder to write structured / modular / well maintained code in CF, I do not thing the language lends itself naturally to this. CF is primarily a tag-driven language rather than class/OO driven. Having seen quite a few CF apps, this has often seem to have resulted in a mixmash of logic & display code all in the same files, all the large apps I have seen eventually become VERY unmaintainable.

It’s been 2 or 3 years now since i’ve touched CF, so some things may have changed since my days with using it. TBH there are much better platforms on the market today. If you are looking at changing to gain faster dev times, then look at Ruby on Rails. Although documentation and examples are sometimes lacking, any competent Ruby programmer should be able to figure out most issues that can arise (rails does have some issues – no rose tinted glasses here). The MVC structure of the framework forces you to write code that is maintainable.