I’ve made this mistake myself on many occasions but it recently dawned on me: comparing Ruby on Rails with PHP is impossible, because PHP is not an application framework but a scripting language. If you want to compare anything to PHP, compare it to Ruby.
With Rails you have Active Record, Action View and all these other cool technologies and with PHP you have mysql_connect() and echo. With PHP, you have to write code for all the heavy lifting yourself. Rails does it for you.
That was a big draw for me coming from PHP where for each app you have to write another form-verification script or try to integrate a previous one with your new app. This stuff tends to get tedius after awhile and draws you away from more important stuff like, you know, UI design, usability, thinking about your data, and actually creating the app.
