I think CakePHP is the new VB since you can easily install VB6 on any Windows computer and make apps for (at the time) 95% of computers (and for Parallels now a

I think CakePHP is the new VB since you can easily install VB6 on any Windows computer and make apps for (at the time) 95% of computers (and for Parallels now as well), just like PHP apps run on almost any existing web host. Also like VB6, CakePHP apps are based on a very simple language (BASIC versus PHP) while Ruby is different in some ways than languages most programmers are familiar with. Finally, CakePHP and VB6 both evolved from very popular languages used by hundreds of thousands of people for many years (BASIC, QBASIC, regular PHP), while almost nobody used Ruby before Ruby on Rails came along. Finally, on all three points, I'm comparing and contrasting Ruby on Rails. Ruby itself is nowhere near Visual Basic--QBasic might be a better comparison.