I’ve seen a lot of people directly compare Ruby on Rails to PHP. Even after so much media attention, people continue to misunderstand that the valid comparison is PHP to Ruby (with no Rails). Rails is a framework. PHP has frameworks, but they are not (necessarily) called “rails.” Ruby on its own is a language, just like PHP. It has no miraculous way of doing a Flikr photo browser blog in 5 minutes, much like what a popular band-wagon programmer may want to believe. Ruby on Rails, arguably, probably can do a Flikr photo browser blog thingy in 5 minutes. But so could a good PHP framework.
Frameworks make certain common assumptions for the developer to speed up development times. By having predefined database abstraction layers and methods for presenting output, they can significantly reduce the amount of overhead required in producing simple CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) applications.
I’ve looked over Ruby. It’s a neat language. It has its ups, and I can see why some people like its simplicity. But is it better than PHP? Only arguably. Probably only incrementally. But with PHP being a tried-and-tested production class web language, I’d rather bet my money on that horse. Ruby by itself offers no true productivity gains over PHP. And there are now several prominent PHP application frameworks that are closing the gap to Ruby on Rails.