Published in Programming and Scripts on Tuesday, April 19th, 2005
I linked to PHP Cake in the links and resources the other day, and after having played with it a bit I needed more room to say how cool it really is. If you happen to be into PHP but have a certain amount of Rails envy, get on this and check it out.
PHP Cake is a framework developed by Michal Tatarynowicz and based on Rails.
With 8 releases this month alone, the code is rapidly developing into something that will be very useful for people who want to develop easily in PHP using the MVC model. There is already a short tutorial and a small set of docs up on the website, and the latest release adds new form generators and data validation.
If you are a newer programmer, this is a great way to begin writing well structured applications (this being said, it also a good idea to understand how it all works).
Anyways, I haven't done much playing around with Ruby on Rails since it's early days, but for us PHP'ers this looks to be a nice development.
Sitepoint's web devlopment books have helped me out on many occasions both for finding a quick solution to a problem but also to level out my knowlegde in weaker areas (JavaScript, I'm looking at you!). I am recommending the following titles from my bookshelf:
I started freelancing by diving in head first and getting on with it. Many years and a lot of experience later I was still able to take away some gems from this book, and there are plenty I wish I had thought of beforehand. If you are new to freelancing and have a lot of questions (or maybe don't know what questions to ask!) do yourself a favor and at least check out the sample chapters.
The author line-up for this book says it all. 7 excellent developers show you how to get your JavaScript coding up to speed with 7 chapters of great theory, code and examples. Metaprogramming with JavaScript (chapter 5 from Dan Webb) really helped me iron out some things I was missing about JavaScript. That said each chapter really helped me to develop my JavaScript skills beyond simple Ajax calls and html insertion with libs like JQuery.
Like the other books listed here, this provides a great reference for the PHP developer looking to have the right answers from the right people at their fingertips. I tend to pull this off the shelf when I need to delve into new territory and usually find a workable solution to keep development moving. This only needs to happen once and you recoup the price of the book in time saved from having to develop the solution or find the right pattern for getting the job done..
Comments and Feedback
You should check out Prado if you haven't already. Nice component based PHP framework similar to Tapestry.
Ehy, I'm going to try Cake, it looks like a well writtend and rapidly evolving software.
But check also the phpCodeGenie: similar approach... http://phpcodegenie.sourceforge.net/
Ciao
Stefano
See also Biscuit for PHP - which is a little simpler and more rails-like.
http://ripcord.co.nz/biscuit/
Has a nice introductory tutorial too.