[eluser]chinathong[/eluser]
well, ... i'm an asp.net developer since 2001/2 and did it until 2007, i said did it because i finally managed to leave MS world for good ... the only reason that kept me in MS world was that because i was working professionally with it and it paid my bills ... but always un-confortable to the directions of web development with MS and mostly because imho, web development must be done with an interpreted language. (period)
then in 2008 i faced a dilemma similar to yours, but my goal was to leave MS development ... i was hearing things from ruby and rails and decided to give it a try ... not bad, but although ruby language is pure oop and very dynamic, i've found rails framework to be a bloated one, plus it's now merging with another framework named merb (to fix rails issues and i guess, to kill merb as a frmwk) ... i then tested other ruby frwrks like ramaze and sinatra, bacause i like small frwrks, but felt that lack of great community and documentation (although you get some) and the major issue i found is that in the ruby world, it's going to be real hard to find jobs, unless your in the rails bandwagon, plus ruby is not that popular, at least where i live and i think in the rest of the world too.
so i spent almost a year testing new stuff and at the end what i really learned is that you'll be wrong in thinking that using the fastest language (ruby is far from being fast, by the way), the coolest framework will pay your dues, but what really is important is if in the average you'll get your job done and done in a nice way ... rails uses a so strong DSL that will hide ruby language at a point that you think you're programming with ruby, but in fact you are using rails idioms and it's magic ...
so look for a framework that doesn't hide the base language, i think CI does a good job, it has its helpers, some magic, but you don't forget how to code in PHP
in the ruby land, ramaze and sinatra doesn't hide the ruby language, but in ruby land rails dictates :-(
i'm new to CI and also to PHP, but by reading the manual, it's so easy and clear :-)
plus i think rails are for rockstars!
