In the sense of comparing PHP and Rails, then no PHP is not a framework. Codeignitor, Laraval, Cake, Yii; those are PHP frameworks and fair comparisons to Rails.

I can (and have) just grabbed Rack and rolled most everything myself in Ruby and it has way less overhead and is much more performant than Rails. Ruby also has it's own templating language; ERB is part of Ruby core.

So comparing PHP to Rails is a bit apples and oranges.

it's a business decision comparison, not a technical categorical comparison. you need something to receive http request and return http responses, and you're comparing different popular (because hiring, training, and available community / support resources) ways to do that. they might be apples and oranges but at that level you're concerned with comparing fruits.

In this case it was a technical comparison; the original poster stated, "php's performance was an order-to-two or magnitude better than rails".

If you are making a technical comparison then it needs to be at the correct layer of abstraction. If we were to compare performance of Laraval and Rails that would be a fair comparison.

If we are comparing on performance then PHP should be probably be compared to Ruby+Rack since that is sort of the lowest common denominator.

I'm not dogging on PHP here either. Even comparing at the correct level; PHP is still faster, but lets make sure we are making the right comparisons.

i am the original poster.

i was clarifying the compassion.

Very true. It's basically an interface to a C framework.