DHH tried PHP first
Is it worth noting that DHH tried to create Rails in PHP first as that was where his expertise was? He claims to have given up and moved to Ruby as PHP wasn't fast enough at the dynamic stuff.

This makes me think that Cake will only ever be a subset of Rails. The question then is: is it a useful subset?

I'd set more store in frameworks such as Django or Mojavi that have the aim of being good frameworks in their chosen language first, but are happy to steal the occasional good idea from Rails (though as DHH admits, the ideas generally aren't original or unique to Rails, though sometimes Ruby makes the implementation more elegant).

cake comments
Hello --

We've been following cake since april or so.
In my opinion, they should withdraw it because
it is unusable in its current form, even for
"devel" software.

There was a development team coup in july and
the new folks like to open trouble tickets
more than they like to work on the framework.
They lack a point of view, and are trying
to make everyone happy. As a result, of course,
nobody is.

It's ridiculous to call cake a "rails-like"
framework in its current form, although in
april it looked promising.

We are sticking with our own in-house php mvc
framework and are passing on cake at the
current time. You can google "php mvc frameworks"
to get a bunch of others, and perhaps cake
will someday be a worthy addition to that
list.

We keep reading cake's google group because
we hope they get their act together. The
cake logo is spiffy :)

regards,
ww

CakePHP project
Hi Steve. Right now, I am the leader of the project, so I will try to answer your question.

As things are right now, CakePHP has gathered fine amount of community members, that are actively participating in project's development. Everyday we get new Bug Reports, or Enhancement proposals. Unfortunately we are striving with organisational problems right now, but I am actively working to get things up and running.

Also it is worth to note that we are not trying to ripe RoR to PHP. We are tough trying to create a PHP framework that gives similar concepts and usability as RoR.

We have easy to use templates, powered by native PHP syntax with some pretty neat helper methods, some good router and dispatcher code, there is nearly working support for Table Joins and ACL.

Next big release will feature user manual, ACL, stabilized public API and Table Joins.

cake comments
guest2345, I would not agree in your claim that CakePHP is not usable in it's current state - mainly because I am talking with lots of professional developers using it for their smaller projects. I am not claiming (in any way) that CakePHP is ready for it's "big time", but it is on it's way.

Also, we didn't have any "team coup" as you kindly call it. CakePHP's original author decided to leave the project - and he was not pressed to do so by any of other developers. Of course we have had disagreements, but none of them where serious enough.

DHH tried PHP first
dscotson, as I wrote above, we are not trying to copy RoR to PHP. We are trying to create a PHP framework that gives similar concepts and usability as RoR. In PHP. We are not going after maximal similarity but maximal usability.

Also, I cannot understand the speed claim - AFAIK PHP is way faster than Ruby - maybe I am wrong tough?

cake comments
Hi brego -- thanks for your reply!

We look forward to cake's improvement over time. Deserved or not, cake certainly has the most momentum of the current php frameworks (probably because it mentions ruby-on-rails), so it is in everyone's interest it succeeds.

Best of luck making it better -- we have certainly learned from it in our own work, and the google group is a useful source for "all things web MVC". For example, I didn't know about some of the php ajax libs coming out (e.g., xajax), until I read about them in the group.

You can't fool me about the coup; I read the developer's board :)

regards,
ww

DHH tried PHP first
I agree with brego's speed comment -- we have had
no php speed issues for our (admitedly light duty) internal apps. Our biggest complaint is weaknesses in the php language itself, but that ship has sailed :)

ww

DHH tried PHP first
I seem to remember reading that PHP wouldn't allow DHH do some of the things he wanted to do, but the flexible Ruby would. Don't recall him ever raggin' on PHP's speed...

Fringe Benefits
I actually started with RoR and am going back to PHP in the short run as I am more familiar with the language. The fringe benefit to having similar frameworks across two platforms is that it gives the opportunity to expose developers to the framework concept.

With many shared similarities, I think RoR will benefit as much as Cake will as it adds flexibility and a great transition point for PHP developers wanting to gain exposure to Ruby. But the more I code with Cake, the more I see the simplicity and clean style of the Ruby language.

Fringe Benefits
aoco, I admit that I would love a situation when we all could program in nice and clean languages - unfortunately those of us that get paid, cannot just dictate the rules. The facts are, that PHP is strong in it's market share, and IMO it will be at it's position in some more time.

Also many things are changing if you try to listen to php.internals mailing list. PHP 5.5 will be a big step - it will most probably feature namespaces. I mean, PHP may not be the cleanest language, but it has it's beauty.

DHH tried PHP first
Well, if you find out what exactly it was DHH couldn't do, please post it around, would love to hear it.

Cake looks good so far
I discovered Cake a few weeks ago after giving up on RoR. (RoR looked promising, but my Web host only supports Ruby via CGI, which is much slower; and I'm already very familiar with PHP.)

For such a young product I've found it to be great. There's the occasional bug, but the code is relatively easy to read and one can track those down. It's also pretty easy to extend and tweak. And since PHP is both robust and familiar, anything Cake doesn't yet do I can still code myself.

In the meantime, the community seems pretty friendly and receptive to ideas. Of course it's hard to tell where the framework will go, but the idea of doing things the PHP way while learning from the lessons of RoR seems like a good approach to me.

Here's another one
You may also want to try out Achievo ATK (http://www.achievo.org/atk). It's in fact older than ruby on rails, but only recently released as a product. It's like RoR or Cake only in that it features Very Rapid Application Development.

Whether RoR is cleaner or faster or slower matters not... it's a freakin' memory hog. I thought I was going to convert all our client sites to RoR, but our server costs would more than triple to give RoR the resources it needs.

I've just found another PHP Framework (http://akelos.org) that is claiming itself to be a Ruby on Rails port to PHP. I had a look to the docs and they seem to have the same functionality as Rails.

Has anyone tried this one out?

I only have positive phrase for cake. I literally write code 3 * faster. Writing code becomes enjoyable again.

Nothing is slower than RoR when it comes to heavy duty enterprise level WebApp. Cake is new but will catch on like wild fire as there is 100X more developers with PhP skills matured and organized.

Give it till the end of this Quarter. Any organized PhP framework for easy WebApp development is going to make a dent in the web 2 product development revolution ebyond what we can guess right now.