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Read it, comment, and share it with your friendsEnjoying Cake
Today I finally managed to install a decent Windows XP server package: XAMPP. Previous attempts at using some sort of “localhost” always had problems, but XAMPP is as smooth as it gets.
My reason for installing XAMPP was to install CakePHP and start learning it. I’ve been doing server-side coding with PHP for a little over a year now and I figured it was about time to find a great MVC framework. Especially in PHP. I looked to Cake at Snook’s advice and all I can say is: I can’t believe I didn’t learn cake sooner. Just walking through the blog tutorial and learning the MVC framework really blew me away in terms of how simple application development can be with the right tools. A halfway-decent knowledge of Cake would have really come in handy a few weeks ago when the other Guava Studio developers and I took on a web survey project for Cornell. There was so much work in terms of writing forms, implementing logins, and creating admin pages that would have been nearly eliminated if we had started our project with Cake. I feel like Cake allows me to do just about anything in terms of applications, at least the simple ones.
I have to jump on the bandwagon and say: if you are still working with just plain code (especially PHP), then you should seriously learn a platform like CakePHP. After all, Snooks’ new website recently moved from MovableType to custom-built CakePHP, and you wouldn’t even notice the difference. He has even more functionality on his site than he had before. Just give CakePHP a look and you’ll see how much it offers.
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Responses to my articleChristian - You might also want to try VertrigoServ (you know, in the future or something). It’s more up-to-date than XAMPP, and I find its control interface easier to use.
http://vertrigo.sourceforge.net/
Thanks kramtark, Vertrigo looks great and I’ll try it if XAMPP doesn’t serve my needs.
How does the PHP framework differ in comparison to some of the other stuff that’s out there? Is it easy to pick up if I have intermediate PHP skills?
Speaking from my own experience, you’re fine if you have a decent understanding of databases and some experience with object oriented programming in PHP. The blog tutorial is great, but the rest of the documentation is lacking. Cake does a lot of stuff magically for you, but the same magic can leave you scrambling for the API.
Fortunately, all the source code is easily searchable online, and I hear the IRC channel is very helpful.
“Is it easy to pick up if I have intermediate PHP skills?”
Considering that I have intermediate PHP skills, yes. Remember that Cake is all about simplifying the tedious stuff: forms, SQL queries, add/edit/delete, so on. If you can wrap your mind around the MVC way of doing things and you have some experience making database driven sites, a framework like Cake PHP should prove to be very helpful.
its really not that tough, just started today after reading your post. on a side note, what is your take on contributing to open source projects like cakephp?
Contributing? Well, what better way to help the folks that make our lives easier? After all, if I use Cake in my next few projects and it helps me out, I’m going to donate too.
Sweeeet… IBM just released the first in what will be a series of articles about CakePHP.
Check it out:
https://www6.software.ibm.com/developerworks/education/os-php-cake1/index.html
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