A house built on Cake batter?

Submitted by Brian McMurray on Mon, 02/19/2007 - 22:12

I've been working with CakePHP for about 6 months now building a few different applications. In my time with it so far, I'm pretty much in love. This is rapid application development, and it is like crack. It is simply amazing to see how quickly I can get functioning scaffolding up once the database has been designed.

CakePHP and the MVC design architecture is not the easiest concept to just pick up, but now that I understand it, I cannot imagine building an application in the "traditional" way (which I've done with phpLabMan).

What I'm wondering about now, is deployment. As a friend pointed out in a rather heated discussion over AIM one night, relying on a framework like CakePHP means that these applications rely on something in a constant state of evolution, plus the application cannot just be dropped onto any webserver and run (it requires Cake to be installed as well). CakePHP is nice because it doesn't require any actual operating system level install, like Ruby on Rails, but none-the-less, an application built on Cake requires Cake to run.

What do you other developers out in the wild think of this? Is it too risky to rely on a framework that doesn't "natively" exist on most webservers (though PHP itself isn't always installed universally, and we won't get into versioning differences there, either) to gain the productivity and development benefits?

Is choosing to go with CakePHP or Ruby any different than choosing to go with ColdFusion or ASP.NET or even PHP?

Comments

by Andrew Henze - 04/04/2007 - 20:27

Most of our clients know early in a project on which server the site will be hosted. This often determines the PHP or ASP.NET choice. This will also determine the PHP or Cake/PHP choice in the future.
Very few sites are built from scratch. Clients just won't wait that long. I think using something like Cake is far better than a classic codebase as it should be (hopefully) easier for other programmers to jump in.

by Tim - 02/20/2007 - 19:38

I don't think it's that risky because as you began to point out, it's not a whole lot different than choosing to go with PHP or ASP. ROR is becoming huge, so there will be more support out there for it on servers. The same could come true with Cake. It may become so popular that it becomes a standard feature or close to it. I think it's all relative.