Introducing Ruby Ain’t Hypertext Preprocessor (RAHP)
By the time of this writing, a lot of people have been claiming that Passenger will cause a revolution in the Ruby on Rails community. And even though we agree with them to a certain point (
), we believe that one should always have a trump card in case all else fails. We’ve been working on our trump card for quite some time now in great secrecy.
Today, we’re pleased to announce this trump card to the world: Ruby Ain’t Hypertext Preprocessor (RAHP).
What is RAHP?
RAHP is a Ruby parser written in PHP, which will enable you to run all your Ruby applications within a PHP environment! This was possible due to the fact that Ruby and PHP are both Turing Complete.
Since PHP still enjoys more support among webhosts than Ruby on Rails, we’ve decided to combine the best of both worlds with RAHP. And as you may already have heard from a friend, PHP scales really well in Enterprise environments, unlike Rails applications.
But wait! It doesn’t end there! Using Zend optimizer we’ve been able to infer a tremendous performance boost, and we think we may need to retract our previous benchmark post on Ruby vs PHP. :$
Long story short:
- RAHP will enable you to run your Rails applications pretty much on every webhost out there!
- Because RAHP is based on PHP, your Rails applications will be able to use the thousands of existing PHP libraries with ease!
- It is common knowledge that PHP is extremely scalable (unlike Rails). So by the transitive property, your Rails applications will become scalable as well, with the help RAHP on Rails!
Come to think of it, we’re considering to discontinue our work on Passenger in favor of RAHP. We’ll have to sleep on it though.
Stay tuned!

Ian Ownbey said,
April 1, 2008 @ 7:42 pm
The ruby community applauds you for bringing rails out of the dark ages, into the bright light of PHP.
Good work
Aaron Stockton said,
April 1, 2008 @ 7:43 pm
Good to see some good ol’ April 1st love. Keep up the good work guys!
Piyush said,
April 1, 2008 @ 9:48 pm
he he
nice one
Ninh said,
April 2, 2008 @ 12:20 am
Unfortunately, Ms. April Phool (our Quality Assurance intern) has advised against a release of RAHP
Ah well, Passenger it is then 
Free Mind » Blog Archive » Ruby on Crack: yet another web framework said,
April 2, 2008 @ 3:45 am
[…] Ruby-talk 的邮件列表里发现了 N 个 Ruby fork 要发布了,还有用 PHP 写的 Ruby 。其他社区也很活跃,Java 似乎是今年的一个主角:大家都说 XXX 要迁移到 […]
Gallo said,
April 3, 2008 @ 12:06 am
Of all the April Fools jokes this one actually had me going till I read the comments. I almost closed my laptop and curled into the fetal position heart broken :D. Keep going on Passenger….waiting for the official release makes me feel like a 3 year old waiting for Santa.
Cheers
This Week in Ruby (April 7, 2008) | Zen and the Art of Programming said,
April 7, 2008 @ 11:01 am
[…] trend continued with Cobol on Cogs and for the ASP.NET and PHP nostalgic, with Acts as ASP.NET and RHAP (Ruby Ain’t Hypertext Preprocessor). Avdi Grimm even found the final solution to the whole Monkey-patching diatribe: Ninja-Patching, […]