One of the main problems which made me – sadly – abandon Rails was Ruby itself: personally I’ve never seen a programming language with a cleaner and more elegant syntax, but also – at least at the time – there weren’t many hosts supporting it. LuckilyI found CakePHP quickly after that…
Now however, more and more hosting companies boast full Rails support, and so when recently I had to move to a new host, I made sure it was Rails-friendly, just in case I wanted to give Rails another try, someday.
Oh well, the temptation was so strong that today, only a two days after switching to my new host, I felt I had to try it, I had to taste something different than the usual Cake.

I decided to (re-)read and follow the OnLamp tutorial about RoR, step by step, once again. I quickly typed rails cookbook from my shell and voilá, rails silently creates the skeleton of my application:

README
Rakefile
app/
components/
config/
db/
doc/
favicon.ico
index.html
lib/
log/
public/
script/
structure.txt
test/
tmp/
vendor/

That’s familiar: it’s very similar to what CakePHP’s directory structure used to look like. Now Cake evolved and adopted its own schema, which – I must say – seems more functional than RoR’s, at least at a first glance:

• app/
  • config/
  • controllers/
  • models/
  • plugins/
  • tmp/
  • vendors/
  • views/
  • webroot/
• cake/
  • config/
  • docs/
  • libs/
• vendors/

Cake felt the necessity to divide what you can mess with (app/, vendors/) from what you’d better not touch (cake/). Rails just left everything on the same level.

After creating my database and the necessary tables I have to edit config/database.yml, which corresponds to Cake’s app/config/database.php. Then things start to become a bit different from Cake, as Rails offers some very handy built in scripts which can be used to automatically create your application’s files, i.e. executing ruby script/generate controller Recipe creates the controller and other bits:

exists  app/controllers/
exists  app/helpers/
create  app/views/recipe
exists  test/functional/
create  app/controllers/recipe_controller.rb
create  test/functional/recipe_controller_test.rb
create  app/helpers/recipe_helper.rb

And so on. Anyhow… I followed the tutorial and yes, it was a nice read. CakePHP borrowed a lot from Rails but not everything. Inevitably Ruby’s syntax is less verbose and looks very very clean:

<% highlight :ruby do %>
class RecipeController < ApplicationController
scaffold :recipe

def list
@recipes = Recipe.find_all
end

def edit
recipe = Recipe.find(params[“id”])
@categories = Category.find_all
end
end
<% end %>

While CakePHP’s, simply because it uses PHP and not Ruby, looks less pretty:

<% highlight :php do %>
class RecipesController extends AppController
{
var $scaffold;

function list()
{
$this→set(‘recipes’, $this→Recipe→findAll());
}

function edit($id)
{
$this→set(‘recipe’, $this→Recipe→find(“id = $id”));
$this→set(‘categories’, $this→Category→findAll());
}

}
<% end %>

CakePHP Development Team did a great job translating some of Rails functionalities into PHP, and the while CakePHP’s syntax is much cleaner if compared to PHP’s standard spaghetti-code approach, Ruby just looks much more clear, sorry. Imagine a world without funny unnecessary brackets, pointless semicolons and where everything just looks better: that’s Ruby.

Sigh. Now I do understand why Rails was built in Ruby and not in PHP: simply because a PHP’s Rails would have been outscored by its “Ruby port”!

One thing I liked about Rails which has not been ported in Cake (yet) is a somehow smarter way of scaffolding. While the Ruby code above actually works, the CakePHP’s edit method doesn’t, or better, it does but not as expected: when you remove var $scaffold the scaffold is just plain gone, and you have to code everything yourself, while in Ruby you can leave the scaffold and then develop methods one by one, and still be able to use scaffolded methods if you didn’t define the custom ones.

The other thing I noticed about RoR is that it definitely handles errors better! This is probably another language issue. I basically forgot to set a category for the recipes, and when executing my custom list of recipes I got a very, very well structured error page showing something like:

<% highlight :ruby do %>
NoMethodError in Recipe#index

Showing app/views/recipe/index.rhtml where line #18 raised:

You have a nil object when you didn’t expect it!
The error occured while evaluating nil.name

Extracted source (around line #18):

15: <% @recipes.each do |recipe| >
16:
17: <= link_to recipe.title, :action => “show”, :id => recipe.id >
18: <= recipe.category.name >
19: <= recipe.date >
20:
21: < end >
< end %>

I took a screenshot of the page, because it was too nice: check it out. This error page really tells you what’s wrong, and even prints the lines of code around the error! It also lets the developer check the full backtrace and every sort of information… Can we have this in CakePHP please? I actually started to develop something like this, but seemed quite hard to do in PHP.

CakePHP seems to use a multiple level database abstraction: in other words, popular abstraction layers like ADOdb or PEAR::DB have been wrapped in a “driver” which basically extends the DboSource class (which is the most high level database abstraction). Some people don’t like the idea, because this means that the could be some performance issues, for one, and also that inevitably not all features offered by either ADOdb or PEAR::DB are used. In my very, very, very modest opinion (I’m not an expert on this matter), this solution focus on achieving good database compatibility leaving the doors open for further tinkering, if needed.

Having said this, yes, the possibilities are good that your favorite database is supported by CakePHP, more or less. Of course, as repeatedly pointed out by some CakePHP core developers, Cake dev team didn’t and is not going to test every database with Cake, using either of the two abstraction layers, but users are more than welcome to do so.

Let’s now have a look at what is known to work with Cake:

MySQL works fine, and is currently recommended as preferred database solution. What about MySQLi? Well, thanks to mappleJoe there’s a (PHP5 only!) driver ready to be used.

SQLite is supported natively, or so it seems… what about the newest SQLite3? Yes, probably: there’s a quick howto on ThompsonLife.net to make it work through the dbo_pear driver.

Access works through the ADOdb driver, as reported in CakePHP wiki (thanks ivanp).

FileMaker is getting there: things aren’t that easy, but bdb is doing all his best to make it work, good luck!

Neil Fincham was also trying to develop a custom driver to support Pervasive through a unixODBC driver. Best of luck!

For other databases, check ADOdb’s list of supported databases and use the dbo-adodb driver, or use PEAR::DB (for fbsql, ibase, informix, msql, mssql, mysql, mysqli, oci8, odbc, pgsql,sqlite and sybase) using the dbo-pear driver.

What I keep finding online is other open source projects adopting CakePHP as backend and structure. I’m sure there are many examples which could be mentioned here, but I chose two in particular: one has been around for a few months and the other is just born.

AMFPHP is quite an interesting project:

“[it] is an open-source Flash Remoting gateway. It’s fast, reliable, 100% free and open-source. Flash Remoting is a technology built into the Flash player core that enables sending data between the server and the client seemlessly.”

In other words, it makes lifes much easier for developers who’d like to integrate their flash animations and script more tightly into their PHP application. If you are curious to see some results, head off to AMFPHP showcase.
Cool, but what has this project to do with CakePHP? Well, gwoo recently created CakeAMFPHP, a CakeForge project which just yesterday reached its 0.4.0 release, and it’s fully compatible with AMFPHP 1.2.3 and CakePHP 0.10 final.
Here’s an excerpt taken from CakeAMFPHP README.txt file:

“[…]
1) get CakePHP 0.10 final (http://cakephp.org)
2) get amfphp 1.2.3 (http://amfphp.org)
3) get the UFO js http://www.bobbyvandersluis.com/ufo/
4) put amfphp into /app/vendors
5) put cakeamfphp into vendors
6) put the cake_gateway.php in /app/webroot
7) put the cakeamfphp.php in /app/views/helpers
8) put CakeMySqlAdpater.php in /app/vendors/amfphp-core/adapters
9) Voila: NetServices.setDefaultGatewayUrl( ‘http://localhost/cake_install/cake_gateway.php’);
Access the service browser through
http://localhost/cake_install/vendors/cakeamfphp/cakebrowser/”

The installation doesn’t seem too painful at all. And – guess what – gwoo recently updated a very informative tutorial showing how to create a simple – but still impressive – bullettin board with CakeAMFPHP.

“Cool, but I never liked flash, what about AJAX?”

CakePHP has a nice AJAX helper to be used in conjunction with prototype, but there are truly a lot of libraries, mini-frameworks, pre-built applications to create interactive desktop-like user interfaces. Some people may already know qooxdoo,

“[…] an advanced open-source JavaScript-based GUI toolkit. qooxdoo continues where simple HTML is not enough. This way qooxdoo can help you implement your AJAX-enhanced web 2.0 application – easier than ever before.”

In a recent discussion on CakePHP user group someone suggested the possibility to integrate qooxdoo with CakePHP. Apparently qooxdoo people were evaluating various MVC frameworks, and Cake was obviously listed together with two other Rails clones for PHP. The good news is that 100rk just started a new project called CQX, which – although still in pre-alpha a development demo is already available, and it shows off most of qooxdoo’s features… Take a look

Best of luck to 100rk and his brand new project, I really hope to see more of it soon!

The good thing is that the new template seems to load faster, mostly due to the fact that I hardly used images <- [not true, te new site appears to be slower, maybe not due to the images], at any rate, let’s see how it goes. I can imagine I’ll have to implement some sort of caching system for the tagging system in particular, but fortunately CakePHP apparently comes with a built-in caching mechanism for views, models etc. etc. although the documentation available seems to be scarce at the moment, and I’ve been to lazy to investigate any further.

• Add, delete, edit and publish articles
  
• Customizable user permissions, ideally role-based
(writer, editor, publisher, etc.)

• Creating and managing monthly publications
  
• Editor's tests
  
• User signups, notifications, etc.
  
• RSS feed generation
  
• Sending newsletters to subscribers
  
• Logging user actions
  

• A web server - Apache is fine, and ISS is reported to be working
  
• PHP - Either version 4 or 5, Drupal started supporting PHP5 since 4.6.0 release
  
• A PHP-compatible database - MySQL or PostgreSQL is recommended
  

[*]Administrator - Able to access everything and change every setting of the site
[*]Publisher - Able to write, edit and publish every kind of content on the site, but not able to administer user accounts, permissions and similar administrator-only tasks.
[*]Editor - Able to write and edit anything on the site, but not to publish it.
[*]Writer - Able to write articles, blogs and similar content, but in some cases not allowed to edit it.

• Don't bother doing anything: any data on the old site will not be transferred to the new one.
  
• Make the old website available somewhere else as an
archive of old documents.

• Import all the data from the old site to the new one.
  

[*]Webform - allows the creation of any kind of web form. Users can customize field types, values, labels and messages. The module also provides ways to process forms by either saving data to the database or emailing it, which we can use for things like the Editor's Test and surveys.
[*]Flexynode - This module is simple and powerful - it allows users to create their own content types without coding a single line. In my example, I cloned the story module to create the zZine Article content type. This is easy to do, and functional, but what happens if someone wants to include an additional field to the article submission form? I can probably do this using hooks, but if I was lazy I could do the same thing with the flexynode module. I actually used this module for our podcast section[20], and it did an excellent job.