I have been hearing about Ruby on Rails for last few months, so I finally thought I'd check it out. Ruby is a programming language, and rails is an application framework. For about the last 2.5 years, I have been writing my web applications in PHP. It's been working well for me. I feel like I'm relvatively proficient at it.

I started writing a content management system as I was learning PHP. As a result, it contains mixed programming styles. In the early days, I wrote procedural programs, and put all my scripts in my web root directory. Later I got a little smarter and made a directory structure of my scripts. I also started using classes and objects. This made things a lot easier to re-use later.

At some point I started using a template engine I got from a tutorial, and modified it to my liking.

My CMS now is around 25,000 lines of code, and only the newer parts are organized very well. I am always thinking of how I could improve the way it is all organized. After completing my first rails tutorial, I got some inspiration for how to overhaul my CMS. I need to build a moderately complex app with rails to get a clearer picture of what I need to do.

So, I think I will write an application framework for PHP, which borrows some concepts from rails. I like the way rails configures your .htaccess file to make simple urls. It can also make sense of database tables without needed to code any database specific stuff.