ReadWriteWeb

Udemy has put together an infographic that compares Ruby, PHP and Python. This looks (briefly) at the history, popularity, ease of use, demand for programmers, benchmarks and more for each language. If you're job-hunting, Udemy says that you probably want to know PHP above Ruby or Python.

According to Udemy, Python is the "most-discussed" language, followed by PHP and Ruby. The rankings come from IEEE Spectrum's analysis of IRC discussions. Udemy also looks at the TIOBE Index, where PHP outranks Ruby and Python.

How exactly should you gain visibility into the performance levels your customers are seeing when they use your Web applications? One method that's still in wide use is compelling users to install plug-ins and background processes. But for many users, that's not just performance monitoring, that's behavior monitoring. You don't want your analytics tool straying too far into the realm of potential privacy violations.

Until HTML5 can fully implement its standard methodology for capturing browser performance specs, Web developers need alternatives. One candidate, provided by a company RWW spoke with called New Relic, is to have Web apps servers supply performance measurement agents to clients while the apps themselves are being served. These agents communicate not with your server, but with New Relic instead, and the results are made visible as analytics charts through your browser.

In a very short period of time - just the last 18 months - Salesforce.com has risen from "up-and-comer," straight through "challenger" status, to the potential out-and-out leader in workforce software. Every move it has made so far, including the December 2010 purchase of open cloud platform Heroku, has been part of a well-played strategy thus far to build leveraged platforms in cloud-based services the way Microsoft leveraged its platforms for office applications... only somewhat faster.

This morning, Salesforce has fired a volley straight at the heart of Microsoft's leveraged tower. Do.com - a free, Heroku-based service coupled with Gmail, but enabled for all e-mail users - is a cloud-based, socially-oriented task management and collaboration platform aimed not just at Salesforce's typical office user, but the general public. It serves not only as a group planning tool for any scale of project, including the smallest scale (e.g., remembering to pick up groceries), but as a kind of cloud desktop for collaborating around Google Docs.

There's a notable absence of (conclusive) studies comparing the current acceptance rate of Heroku, the fast-growing cloud platform for dynamic language-based apps, to that of Windows Azure, DotCloud, CloudFoundry and the numerous other players in the suddenly stormy PaaS space. Perhaps only now are these players beginning to be seriously compared against one another for features and service levels.

What Heroku has going for it are three differentiators: 1) extremely simple app deployment, almost turnkey for anyone who already uses Git (for a Windows guy like me, there may be one or two extra steps; 2) as solid a commitment as a company can make to dynamic languages like Ruby, having hired the guy who created it; 3) an "in" with enterprises that would otherwise think Clojure is a kind of paper clip, by virtue of being acquired last December by Salesforce.com and forging a partnership with business consultancy Accenture last April.

It seems like the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) has been around forever. Nope, just for 0x10, er, 16 years. Today marks the 16th anniversary of the announcement to comp.lang.perl.announce, which was the culmination of about two years of work by a number of Perl contributors like Jarkko Hietaniemi, Tom Christiansen, Randal Schwartz, and Bill Middleton.

AppFog tomorrow will announce adding support for Ruby and Node.js to its collection of PHP solutions for developing Web apps. You can scale up and manage your apps with all three languages. With AppFog, users can set up ready-for-code servers quickly and deploy them with just a single command. The company recognizes the growth of both Ruby and Node.js and has a community of 20,000 developers who have deployed 10,000 apps using its developer tools.

The company has a private beta for hosting on CloudFoundry as well.

Once upon a time, before the word Internet (or cloud) put dollar signs in VC eyes, sites were built with static tools. All a good Webmaster needed was a text editor and a Web server – maybe a few images and blink tags if they were feeling fancy.

These days, most of the Web is powered by dynamic content management systems like WordPress or Drupal. But what if there was another way, a better way, leveraging cloud services like Amazon S3 or GitHub? Werner Vogels has done just that by using S3 and Jekyll.

Learn Ruby the Hard Way is a free online book on the Ruby language for beginner programmers. It's an adaptation of Zed Shaw's Learn Python the Hard Way translated into Ruby by Rob Sobers.

Cloud9 today announced a cloud-based commercial Integrated Development Environment that enables web and mobile developers to work together in remote teams anywhere.

In 1993 Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto decided to a create a new programming language, one inspired by languages like Perl, Python, Smalltalk and Lisp but tuned towards Matsumoto's own needs and preferences. Matsumoto's preferences resonated with a lot of developers and today Ruby is one of the most popular development languages around.

Today Heroku, a Ruby platform-as-a-service provider owned by Salesforce.com, announced that Matsumoto is joining the company as the chief architect of Ruby.