As part of our R&D effort, we routinely explore Web development tools and trends to better understand where we stand and where and how we should be moving forward to keep up with the ever changing Web technologies.

Our radar is always on and it has picked up a precious gem - Ruby. Ruby on Rail (a Web framework based on Ruby programming language) has been getting a lot of buzz recently so we decided to investigate how PHP and Ruby compares from both technical and non-technical view points.

Avid readers of this site already know that EVOKNOW prides itself as a leading PHP and MySQL solution provider (shown on every page title of the site). So before you click away, let us give you the punch line -- we already use Ruby in functionality quality control of our PHP-based Web applications!

So keep reading, this is not an article to bash Ruby because we happen to call ourselves PHP experts. Our sole desire is to inform you where things are heading; how you use this information is truly your own call.