CakePHP - The New Ruby on Rails?
April 30th, 2008 | Categories: design, launch, networks, strategy, trendsThe hype surrounding CakePHP is obvious. This open source web application framework is gaining widespread exposure and quickly becoming the framework of choice for many new websites. As I have stated in previous blog posts, I am not a programmer. For this reason, the discussion will take place at a high level.
Why has CakePHP exploded in popularity? Its success can be attributed to the head-on collision of two trends: PHP and Ruby on Rails.
While Ruby on Rails was grabbing all the headlines in 2005, CakePHP was quietly born. Programmers ranted about the model-view-controller (MVC) architectural pattern of the former framework. CakePHP was quick to adopt a similar architectural pattern. So why even discuss CakePHP? Well, PHP is an incredibly popular scripting language used my many web developers. Ruby? Not so much. It isn’t as popular and less programmers use it to code.
In other words, the emergence of CakePHP satisfied the needs of web developers craving an MVC architectural pattern written in PHP. I truly believe this is the reason CakePHP has soared in status, although I’d like to hear feedback from the programmers, web developers, and coders out there.
I hate to say it, but now programmers can have their cake and eat it too…
April 30th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Sorry PHP sucks. The fact that it has taken 10 years and the rise of Ruby on Rails for PHPers to figure out that MVC is a good thing just points out the fact that PHP developers in general don’t know much about object oriented programming or patterns.
May 1st, 2008 at 7:46 am
Why is it that all PHP programmers get blamed for a few bad eggs?
Yes PHP allows you to do bad things, that doesn’t mean we all do bad things and should switch to Rails immediately, because you couldn’t possibly write bad code with Rails
CakePHP is a very solid framework, I’m hoping 1.2 goes final soon. I’m using it on a couple of project at the moment and have been very impressed with its features. I very much enjoy baking sites.
@Tim: Just to set things straight, I’ve been using MVC with PHP long before Rails was released, and yes I build websites in both PHP and Rails.
May 2nd, 2008 at 3:23 am
I use Ruby. I love coding in Ruby. It is extremely flexible and powerful-enough to be compared to LISP (but no it’s not THAT powerful). At the same time Ruby is also the most readable language I have ever seen.
I haven’t been doing this long enough to be sure of anything, but as best I can tell, the PHP frameworks exist because a lot of people still know PHP. But the fact is, you don’t need to know PHP. You can learn Ruby instead. It is more powerful, more readable, and more flexible.
Honestly I would expect another Ruby framework (merb?) to take over Ruby on Rails before another PHP framework.
Anyways, if you HAVE to use PHP, take a look at http://www.prontoproject.com/. The author is from Victoria; this guy is a genius.
May 4th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
We have began using cakePHP since the middle of last year and have been very happy with it.
Ruby is great too but because of a short turn around time on a project we didnt want to force our programmers to learn a new language.
The framework has similar command line methods that allow you to quickly build your site and CRUD methods the same as rails does.
Pronto looks awesome and I will try it out. I love JQuery.
May 15th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
I’ve used both Ruby on Rails and a PHP equivalent called CodeIgnighter. I have to say the PHP implementation is much better in my opinion.
Lets face it, RoR and PHP are web languages….and what web developer wants to work from the command line? None
May 19th, 2008 at 11:46 pm
Let’s don’t compare frameworks written in different programing or scripting languages. PHP has his limitations…
And as for PHP frameworks - I strongly suggest to have a look at Symfony