Also I really agree with the quote that rails is good but “if you get big enough rails will suffer.” It will indeed. Thankfully, however most e-commerce sites don’t get slammed, so rails actually honestly is fast enough for them. Though I suppose it’s a little disconcerting what you noted about php being faster so getting more clicks. Wonder if it’s the prototype .js’s or something. Just my $0.02

I’m going back to PHP for new development, but I’m taking a lot of the concepts I learned from Rails (as well as some J2EE concepts) and making my own little / simple framework that is more tailored to what I need it to do.

Ruby on Rails is a nice box and a good environment to try to force programmers to write good MVC code, but try to build outside that framework, or interface with non-ruby databases and you get a lot of issues.

Also, I rather write my own SQL that use Active Record. I like writing SQL and looking through the logs, I always feel I could write better SQL than what they auto-generate.

PHP has been out much longer and there is so much stuff out there for it that still works in PHP5 even though it was intended for 4. Rails is poorly documented, the same stuff in Rails 1 doesn’t work in Rails 2 and the community feels as arrogant as the Debian junkies.

-Sum