On Quoderat at Megginson.com, there's this new article that begs the question: "Rails vs. PHP: MVC or view-centric?".

This week, I decided to try PHP and Ruby-on-Rails for prototyping web applications (I'd never used either before). These are both web-application frameworks that serious J2EE-type developers tend to sniff at, claiming that they may be fine for simple toys but are not suitable for real projects. Otherwise, however, the two are drastically different: PHP encourages a page-oriented architecture and makes you do a lot of extra work to get any kind of model-view-controller (MVC) setup; Rails enforces an MVC architecture with pre-defined naming conventions for database tables, etc., and makes you do a lot of extra work to design your application any other way.

He goes on, making the point that, in his opinion, web applications are all about views - not objects. He also mentions that when he was creating simple prototypes in each of the two languages, PHP was more like a cool breeze on a hot day, versus Rails that was a disappointment. The only thing that seemed simple was the basic CRUD steps. Outside of that, things just got overly complicated quickly...