tl;dr;
I am putting some facts and personal experience to prove that PHP has healthier, more competitive and loosely-coupled ecosystem, than Ruby. I am talking about Performance, Syntax and Coding aspects, Community and Tools support.

If you want to skip a lot of empty rant - scroll till the "The main part goes here..." heading :) But I need to say all of this...

What? Yet another anti-RoR rant?

Yep, I started to gather materials for this posts more than 6 months ago, and I know about all that discussions that are going around RoR's pros and cons recent weeks. The main are "My time with Rails is up" and Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room. I am definitely not so experienced in RoR to say something new, that hasn't been said yet in terms of architecture. I just want to argue on Rails leadership in web development.

[PHP] ... fragmented, independent and isolated communities ... is one big ocean of disconnected islands.

Says AkitaOnRails, and as always that's true from one side, but not true - from another. Dear Rubyists let me show you the world of the closest competitor - PHP. And there is nothing special in Ruby for "Basecamp-like" app, that we can't find in PHP.

Read th most recent version of this guide here http://rwdtow.stdout.in/. I have transferred it to GitHub Pages with custom domain.

Intro

This guide is born after a question "Could you write a list of all the things, that a good RoR developer should know?". I decided to expand it to a whole Ruby Web development and related “Full Stack” skills (but also limit it to "Web", as it is not about Ruby in general).

I am inspired by "PHP The Right Way" guide format (and advises). So this guide also contains sections dedicated to very important aspects of web dev, some explanation (if needed) and list of tutorial links.

Sometimes I will suggest some tools or Gems (with comparison if possible), but it is only to have a starting point. It is up to you to decide "use it or not".

Important notice. All suggestions in this guide is my personal opinion. It is not an absolute truth or a 100% best practice. I just want to suggest the best I know.

Also this guide is not complete tutorial - some clear steps like installing Ruby (via rbenv or rvm), managing dependencies via Bundler, etc. are not described due to wide coverage of these aspects in other tutorials (and there are no fatal issues regarding of e.g. how you install Ruby, if it works – that's fine).

Why not "Ruby On Rails" and not "The Right Way"?

I am glad you are asking! :)
It is not a secret that most of Ruby Web Dev came in Ruby via Rails. That is good and bad simultaneously. It simplifies the entry barrier, but also narrows knowledge range. This guide have special RoR section to cover some RoR-specific things, but mostly it will encourage you to look outside of Ruby on Rails and especially “Rails Way”. And I can't call the way described here as "The Right Way". It is just another way to look on common things.

Manifesto

• Prefer simple solutions (Occam's razor)
• Configuration over Confusion
• Boilerplate over Magic

Preamble

Mostly it is about template engines (that hide away real HTML) in Ruby (as due to app runtime specific it is very easy to add pre-compiled "sweets" there, and everybody do it). But in general such tpl engines could exist in any server side language.
I don't like DSLs and abstractions that lead me away from the "origin". Ok, a careful reader have already got what will I write further :)
This post is not about "stop using it" or "it is bad", it is about "reconsider is it really so useful".

Let's start with examples

• Ruby: ERB, Slim, HAML
• Node.js + JS: JADE, Mustache, doT, Swig (it is unified now with Browserify or Webpack)
• PHP: Twig, PlatesPHP, Dwoo, Smarty

This just a small subset of all existing engines, that I have herd of, just to have an examples. Each language has it's specific, but mostly script web languages are good template engenes by themselves.

And I am really absolutely fine with most of them. Except those that force own HTML-replacement surrogate (it is Slim, HAML or JADE like).

 body
    h1 Markup examples

    #content
      p This example shows you how a basic Slim file looks like.

      == yield

      - unless items.empty?
        table
          - items.each do |item|
            tr
              td.name = item.name
              td.price = item.price
      - else
        p
         | No items found.  Please add some inventory.
           Thank you!

And now I'll try to explain this...