CakePHP to the Rescue
I’ve got a few upcoming web projects that I need to get cranking on. My PHP skills are a little rusty right now (as typically happens when I don’t touch PHP for several months). I watched a super cool demo of Ruby on Rails about 6 months ago and got really excited. Ruby on Rails makes the claim of cutting development time by a factor of 10 for web applications.
The problem is that I don’t feel like learning an entirely new language (Ruby). I’ve gone through some tutorials and kept thinking “I wish I could do this with PHP.” Well, it turns out you can.
CakePHP is an open-source web framework written in PHP. It uses the same MVC framework that Ruby on Rails uses, and does it all in PHP. I’ve watched some of the demos, gone through some of the tutorials, and feel much more at home with it. The biggest challenge I am having is wrapping my head around the whole MVC thing. I can see how it really simplifies things, but it is taking some getting used to.
By this time next month I hope to have two projects completed; one for my Mom, and one for Paula. Then there’s a bigger project (for myself) I’ve been dying to get underway once I’m more comfortable with CakePHP.
