CakePHP: Tasty, Still Undercooked
Last night I went to a Orange County PHP Roundtable meeting for the first time, primarily to learn about CakePHP, a PHP framework that implements MVC and ActiveRecord a-la Ruby on Rails but for PHP. I was impressed with the amount of work that has gone into the framework and the passion of the presenter (Garrett something, President of the Cake Software Foundation). He was there to demonstrate some of the new features coming out on their 1.2 version.
Having developed in PHP for some time I could appreciate all of the pain and agony they are trying to resolve with CakePHP. The problem is that they’re perhaps 1-2 years too late because many disgruntled PHP developers have already moved onto Rails. Also, Cake is Rails-y in its implementation of ActiveRecord, scaffolding, and RESTful service support, but it doesn’t have any unit testing or database migrations features in it. Also, I think the fact that they go out of their way to support PHP 4 only holds them back. And I couldn’t get over the pain of seeing all of those dollar signs all over the code and having the type “new array()” every time you would create an associative array in PHP, which is used often throughout the framework.
The advantage, however, is that PHP is much more mature and has wide community support and is nearly ubiquitous on the Internet as the lingua-franca of website development. People who have large investments in PHP and plan to continue to leverage those investments should take a look at CakePHP.
CakePHP is a valiant effort to prop up the annoying verbosity and syntax of PHP and will extend the life of those teams that have been eating out of the PHP bakery for some time now.
