I don't think something like Cake is a good comparison for Rails, and it's honestly not how I think of PHP. Developing in PHP is making a collection of function

I don't think something like Cake is a good comparison for Rails, and it's honestly not how I think of PHP. Developing in PHP is making a collection of functions and custom made classes hacked together, in my mind. I know there are frameworks, but if you're going to use a fancy framework, you'd might as well use Rails. I wouldn't develop in Ruby without Rails, but I wouldn't develop in PHP with a framework.