First, here’s a bit of background. Rails is a web application framework for the Ruby scripting language. Until a few years ago, Ruby wasn’t very widely used in web development, but the Rails framework changed all that. At this point, web application frameworks weren’t terribly popular, and PHP frameworks in particular were, for the better part, non-existent (Mambo/Joomla and Drupal don’t count.). Rails favoured convention over configuration, and as a result was very quick for basic application development.

PHP developers were moving over to Ruby on Rails, as PHP simply didn’t offer this functionality out of the box, and the PHP frameworks available weren’t much use. Over time, CakePHP, Symfony, CodeIgniter and various other frameworks developed, and we finally had the power of Rails in PHP. Of course, given the size of the PHP community, PHP frameworks matched Rails and surpassed it; we now have mature PHP frameworks for almost any purpose and any development style.

Now, inevitably, language wars debates between Rails and PHP developers ensue, and the common defense of PHP developers was that “PHP isn’t Rails, it’s Ruby.” Fair enough, some suggested; PHP and Ruby were languages, while Rails is a framework. Most PHP development happens without a real framework, while most Ruby web development happens on Rails (there are a handful of other Ruby web application frameworks, but none as successful as Rails).

Here’s my take on it: it may not be fair, but it sure is reasonable. When you think of Ruby web development, you think of Rails, and what can be achieved with it. On the other hand, PHP bundles a lot of its functionality in the core, and with most application development happening on top of this core, it’s the only reasonable comparison you can make.

In fact, it’s certainly not a fair argument, but that doesn’t mean it’s an invalid argument; there’s nothing wrong with Rails:PHP comparison.

That’s not to say Rails is a better framework than, say CakePHP or CodeIgniter; a proper comparison might find that PHP with a mature framework on top is a superior development platform than RoR. But Ruby developers can point to Rails as a demonstration of Ruby web application development, and all us PHP guys have to show for our framework efforts is a medley of different frameworks serving different purposes with no single, accepted way to write applications.