Via reddit I found an article named 7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails listing seven reasons why Derek Sivers likes PHP better than Ruby on Rails.
I disagree with most of his reasons.
Is there anything Rails/Ruby can do that PHP can’t do? No.
I don’t doubt that you can do in PHP what you can do in Rails. The question is how you do it. In my experience with Rails and PHP, I’ve found that writing Rails apps takes much less effort than writing PHP apps.
Is there anything C can do that assembly language can’t do? No. In fact, you can do less in C. Is that a reason to use assembly language? I doubt it.
Our entire company’s stuff was in PHP: don’t underestimate integration.
Depending on the structure of the company’s web site, this should not be so hard. Rails can integrate well with legacy databases, for example. If it’s really hard to integrate Rails with an existing system, then that existing system isn’t as loosely coupled as it should be.
Don’t want what I don’t need.
I’d rather have too many tools (Rails) than too little (PHP). When developing a web app, I don’t want to spend much time adding functionality missing in PHP.
It’s small and fast.
I can’t really argue with that. Ruby and Rails are big and slow.
It’s built to my tastes.
Personal preference of one language over another is a reason to switch back to the former? You don’t say.
I love SQL.
Rails doesn’t prevent you from using SQL at all. I don’t love SQL, but I don’t run away from it either. Some database operations are too complex and slow to code in Ruby; I often write a SQL query that does the same in a much more efficient manner.
Programming languages are like girlfriends: the new one is better because you are better.
I agree that learning a new programming language or framework can teach you new techniques, but I fail to see how that is a valid reason to switch from Rails back to PHP. Also see my comment about C-versus-Assembly above.
One last word: languages are not frameworks. Ruby and PHP are languages, Rails is a framework.