Cake

As you might have noticed from my delicious additions I’ve been digging around Cake looking at whether it’s something I want to consider using for an upcoming side project that Jim and I have been considering. This is just one of many mini side projects that we seem to have no time to actually follow through with. So with that last sentence ringing in my ears, I’ve been trying to find a somewhat RAD (or more QAD as I like to call it - Quick And Dirty) that had a decent MVC style setup and that was written in a language that I actually had some experience with. Ruby on Rails is great, and I’ve played with it since it rose to fame and fortune, but I have squat experience coding ruby, so as soon as I need to deviate form the Rails I’m derailed. Same with Django, which was slightly better as I had some exposure to Python, but again my exposure was so limited that doing anything other than exactly what some else has documented +/- 5 degrees and I’m derailed.

I’m old new school web, so I know and love PHP well, it’s all I ever used when I freelanced, and I’m totally happy with it.

The temptation to go and try and learn Ruby or Python is great, “everyone is doing it” … “you’ll be so cool” is all the peer pressure I seemed to be getting, but you know what I know what I know and I just don’t right now have time to learn something that fundamental to get a quick prototype out the door fast, so PHP it is.

Which was when I stumbled upon CakePHP. Surprisingly it’s been around for a few years, somehow managing to slip under my radar. It packages itself very much like Django or Ruby on Rails, it seems to over the same level of ease and scaffolding that I was looking for, but under neither it all is my good old friend PHP. This means when something goes wrong - which it will - I can look up it’s skirt and see what all the fuss is about.

Now my initial findings are this.

• Installation and setup was a breeze, maybe 20 minutes to have it on my server saying it had connected to my DB.
• I’m toying with going with the 1.2 branch, if for no other reason than it contains Bake, which is a command line utility for ever rapider RAD construction of your models, views and controllers.
• I really am very rusty on MVC programming, something i thought would be like riding a bike, but I think it’s a train of thought that you get into (and thus can also get out of), and I need to get back into it more - I’ve been doing CSS and JS far to long.
• I really have to stop doing feature creep before even typing a single character of code. I need to sit down the first second an idea occurs and commit to paper or digitally what it’s going to do and mark that version 1. From there out mark subsequent ideas, tweaks and general increased complexity as subsequent versions, I am the worse for going from a simple idea to a massive complex nightmare idea in the matter of a few minutes of down time making a coffee.

More updates as I progress, and more info on the idea we have once we have something more substantive. We’re hoping it’ll be an interesting social experiment directly in the market that Jim and I work in. More to come.