Loud Baking

During the past couple of years, Ruby on Rails has been getting massive attention and I never really got the time to dive into it - learned a couple things here and there, but haven’t really developed any application with it. I liked it for the same reasons that everyone else does: it’s a rapid development framework using the MVC pattern and ActiveRecord.

Learning a new language (in this case 2, Ruby and Rails) is definitely exciting, but having to do that while developing a pretty advanced web application that needs to go live in less than 2 months, raises the bar pretty high.

So I opted for goold ol’ PHP. I have built all kinds of little scripts, hacked many open-source projects (as in modified them) and released 4 of my own turnkey solutions all based on PHP but never had I used an open-source framework for that. This time, things will change. I said in the first post something about CakePHP which is the one I selected for this application and probably more to come.

As Jonathan Snook says it so well:

I almost fear putting this kind of post together as it’s bound to pull the fanatics (in the negative sense of the word) out of the woodworks.

So instead of giving a comparison of the available PHP MVC frameworks, I will instead list what I was looking for and believed CakePHP would cover. Here it is:

• Open Source / Free License
• KISS
• OO and MVC
• ORM / Active Record
• Security
• Ajax interoperability
• Good controller structure
• Good helpers available
• Scaffolding

I did try a couple before making my final decision, but here are the resources that helped me make up my mind:

• Taking a look at ten different PHP frameworks, by Dennis Pallett
• CodeIgniter vs. CakePHP, by Jonathan Snook
• New Year’s Benchmarks and A Bit About Benchmarks, by Paul M. Jones
• Glue vs. Full Stack and More framework fun, by Chris Hartjes
• Comparing Frameworks, by Tim Bray