In his keynote talk at the recent Silicon Valley Ruby Conference, Sun’s Tim Bray asserted that “PHP and Ruby are the languages of choice for new web apps.” Coming from most people, this wouldn’t be a remarkable comment, but given that Tim is Sun’s director of web technologies, it is worthy of note. Java wasn’t even on Tim’s list, much less his recommended solution.

Tim raised two major concerns about PHP: security and maintainability. He also pointed out that the object-oriented features “seem bolted on,” and don’t feel right as compared to Ruby. He did note that there are some great PHP applications, such as MediaWiki, WordPress, and Drupal.

Tim asserted that Rails is ahead of Java in terms of maintainability because you have so much less code. And, of course, Rails is best for time to market, which can be all-important to the success of a project.

As for when to avoid Rails, Tim cited these situations:

• If the IT group will only deploy Java or .NET
• When you need a lot of experienced developers quickly
• If you have a complex database schema you don’t control
• For an application that does a lot of computation

Tim asserted that “waterfall development just doesn’t work any more.” Some principles for success he cited:

• Be human
• Update often
• Link
• Don’t try to be sticky
• Look good
• Balance hubris and humility
• Free the conversation