The framework has been around for some time, but I found out about it a few days ago: CakePHP.
I’ve been using Ruby on Rails for quite some time now. It’s a very cool framework and it’s fun to work with. However, there’s one big problem I have with it: I can’t host it anywhere!
Well, there are several hosting companies that offer Rails hosting, but the price is pretty steep when compared to my current hosting plan. I could get a VPS or dedicated server, but that just be overkill for the applications I want to run.
So, I started thinking. What can be done in Ruby could be done in PHP as well. Maybe not in such an elegant and intuitive way, but it should be possible. And I was right. ~ After some googling I came across CakePHP. CakePHP aims to implement the MVC (Model-View-Controller) structure in PHP much in the same way Rails does it for Ruby.
After giving it a try I found that CakePHP is a pretty good alternative to Rails. Most importantly, it runs with both PHP4 and PHP5 and it can handle MySQL, SQLite and other standard databases.
If you’re an agile developer but you don’t want to nail yourself down on hosting with Ruby or if you really want to use PHP, CakePHP is a great framework to use!