[kaolinite]

Um, this seems to imply that no framework is being used :-S

The number of posts comparing PHP - a bare language, albeit one that is targeted at the web - with a fully featured framework is scary.

Try building the same application in pure, straight-up ruby vs in PHP. I bet PHP will be faster. But that's not really the point. Nowadays, we use frameworks, so feel free to compare Kohana or Zend to Rails but comparing a language to a framework is silly.