I'm gonna be blunt, and I'm prolly gonna get my ass kicked for it?
RoR is a fad.
I hear a lot about it but having looked at it, I simply don't see it competing with something like PHP, especially with the new version's impending release.
I'd say go PHP for a myriad of reasons. You'll still get all your AJAX support that RoR is mainly used for, as PHP has JSON extensions among other things.
I heard some good things about Ruby on Rails, I haven't used it myself tho.. Dreamweaver seems to be the app of choice for quite a few designers I know..
What exactly are you trying to do? Because a web design program and a development environment are very different things and you'll probably need both...
Exactly what I was about to say. Dreamweaver and Frontpage are development tools that can generate code in a variety of languages. Ruby on Rails and PHP are programming languages that can be written with pretty much anything from a command-line text editor to a fancy code editor like Dreamweaver.
And, I agree with the above statements about RoR being a fad. It does some interesting things, but it'll take a lot more than shinyness to become a mainstream programming language. Plus, it's an utter nightmare to install on IIS, whereas PHP is already pretty good in that area and continually improves with every version, so IIS users who aren't feeling experimental (ie, corporate admins) can't run it anyway. Not that that's particularly relevant, but it's a hurdle that excludes some significant potential market share for RoR.
If you really want to design some good webpages you need to learn HTML (code) & CSS (code).
To create good apps or modify existing ones you're probably going to want to learn PHP (code) & mySQL (database) since there's a lot of apps/content management systems already available using PHP (code) that are free and extensible. That's not to say though there aren't other viable options either.
Oh and a lot of people prefer Dreamweaver, though I'm not sure how it will do now that Adobe owns them. I tend to use Golive (and don't recommend it) and such just to help with creating complex tables and then do a lot of pruning of code from there since it creates heavily bloated code.
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RoR is a fad.
I hear a lot about it but having looked at it, I simply don't see it competing with something like PHP, especially with the new version's impending release.
I'd say go PHP for a myriad of reasons. You'll still get all your AJAX support that RoR is mainly used for, as PHP has JSON extensions among other things.
Just my two cents.
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And, I agree with the above statements about RoR being a fad. It does some interesting things, but it'll take a lot more than shinyness to become a mainstream programming language. Plus, it's an utter nightmare to install on IIS, whereas PHP is already pretty good in that area and continually improves with every version, so IIS users who aren't feeling experimental (ie, corporate admins) can't run it anyway. Not that that's particularly relevant, but it's a hurdle that excludes some significant potential market share for RoR.
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To create good apps or modify existing ones you're probably going to want to learn PHP (code) & mySQL (database) since there's a lot of apps/content management systems already available using PHP (code) that are free and extensible. That's not to say though there aren't other viable options either.
Oh and a lot of people prefer Dreamweaver, though I'm not sure how it will do now that Adobe owns them. I tend to use Golive (and don't recommend it) and such just to help with creating complex tables and then do a lot of pruning of code from there since it creates heavily bloated code.
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