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I use PHP (and the great Symfony framework) for small or mid-size projects, but for enterprise class stuff I use Java. One of the main reasons (yet not the only one) is performance, but I acknowledge it's more of a personal prejudice. How is it going now? any reliable benchmark out there to support my preferences?

Not necessarily for you, but for anybody reading:

More info on jedit-

It's basically a heavy-duty editor. Say you need to set up a big table of constants. BLAH = "blah", or whatever. Or slice and dice some text into code, or rewrite/create a huge series of SQL statements. Very easy with it's BeanShell or regex replacement (multiline, too, if you want). The builtin text macro "Add Prefix and Suffix" is much used. Columnar cut and paste. You don't have to program a C++ library to extend the syntax highlighting, just set up some regexes into an XML config file. Abbreviations (code templates) per file type. Recommended plugins: FTP (edit files remotely), Sessions, XML (works for HTML, too).

Netbeans- great for Java, of course, but it's also very good for PHP, even better than the alternative$. What's nice about it: refactoring. When you're on a variable, it highlights other uses of that variable. It has Symfony support built in, but you can also get it to work to a significant extent with another library or your own. Ctrl+click goes to definition of symbol. Code templates are very handy. They've thought things out like a programmer. E.g., many editors nowadays insert two double quotes when you just type it once. Problem is, after that, you usually want to add a semicolon, and go to the next line. So they added that macro for you already. You can download just a base version with the PHP plugin if you want. The one thing missing is code folding.

I am a PHP Developer and you are right, when I was checking Rails it was really awesome.

Then I discovered http://www.symfony-project.org/ and it was amazing, give it a try, you will also see how much low level work is eliminated entirely. Their documentation and tutorial is awesome too.

I used to work with Zend Framework but now it looks complex and slow compared to Symfony. Of course as most programming discussions, it is a matter of preference. Pretty sure someone is going to come here and say Zend Framework is the best and symfony is crap :)

Long, ugly URLs are a result of the software and practices in use with the web server. I just started looking at PHP frameworks and began with Symfony, which I like though I had some setup issues. Symfony (and other frameworks and web servers, I'm sure) uses a method of "routing" and some other mechanisms in the framework to compose pages from several places and makes urls in the form of:

http://server[/appname]/module/action/<[param][,[param]]...>

Making for a URL more like: http://my.page.com/blog/read/new

Instead of http://my.page.com/blog.php?read=new&prev=42024

Most web server attacks are going to be because of a flaw in the site code, not the system code.

Use a framework and you can avoid a lot of the problems with ease.

There is an initial learning curve but it will increase your productivity 10-fold and handle a LOT of the boring stuff transparently.

I recommend Symfony.

Rails definitely uses more CPU time. However, it can make development of some kinds of things much faster, and you can work at higher levels of abstraction in Ruby than PHP.

Wow, color me surprised, a framework for a language makes development faster than the raw language. It's a shame there aren't frameworks available for PHP that could cut development time in a similar manner as Rails does for Ruby...

That's not all it's used for though, is it.

I work for a multi-national corp which uses several large-scale PHP applications for its operations which have been extremely successful. They are built upon the Symfony framework http://www.symfony-project.org/ which has proven to be a good, secure & reliable MVC application framework.

The grandparent post was spot-on, the maturing of PHP over the past 5 years has been remarkable and is a real testement to the power of the open source ideology.

CakePHP Framework (supports PHP5 & PHP4), Version 1.2 Stable due any time soon.
Symfony. PHP 5 Meta Framework using Propel and other layer components. The accompaning book (free PDF, buyable dead-tree) is a very good documentation.
Prado. Event-Oriented PHP 5 Framework. Very interesting.
Code Igniter. Lightweight PHP Framework for smaller stuff. Neat website.

Django. Python Framework.
TurboGears. Python Meta Framework using some 3rd Party stuff like Templating layers and such.
Zope Web Application Server. To date unmatched. What Rails wants to be when it grows up.

I'm making the assumption that you're talking about creating a database-driven website that's going to need a lot of the CRUD functionality that web dev frameworks facilitate; if this isn't true, the answer is probably "none of the above".

Given that: hand-coding PHP to do this kind of site is almost certainly going to be a painful mistake. You're either going to end up reimplementing your own web development framework, or repeating yourself a huge amount and generating error-ridden and unmaintainable code. Especially if you're going to go with a PHP-based solution, you want to use some kind of framework to minimize the amount of code you have to write. (PHP is, after all, training wheels without the bike :) ).

I'm leery of CakePHP; it's written in PHP 4, which pretty much guarantees bad coding practices. (Oh, you wanted /objects/? Ha!) I've had very positive results with symfony, as several others have mentioned. One thing in particular that it has that's been super-handy is, in addition to scaffolding à la Ruby on Rails, the ability to generate highly customizable "admin" interfaces on the fly, based on a configuration file. This makes interface creation more declarative than programmatic, which IME does wonders for maintainability.