An overview of the CakePHP framework

by Fabio Cevasco — Page 1 of 3

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There are many frameworks available for the PHP programming language nowadays, and especially a lot of RAD (Rapid Application Development) frameworks which aim to make web development faster, less tedious and more organized. CakePHP was one of the first frameworks to port the RAD philosophy - which became so popular after Ruby on Rails - to the PHP programming language. CakePHP v1.0 is now one of the most popular and intuitive solutions for PHP programming, let's discover why...

The PHP programming language became popular because it allows developers to create powerful web applications in an easy way. PHP is dynamically typed, it was born as a procedural language and was originally conceived as a mere form interpreter - things were very simple then. Obviously as PHP's popularity grew, the developer community required additional functions and features to be included inside its core, and the latest PHP5 offers all possible web-development-related functionalities and even more, from basic form handling to platform-specific system functions. Even PHP has its weak spots of course, among which a sort of inherent disorganization both at core level (no namespaces, inconsistent naming conventions, etc.) and at user lavel: PHP code can be seamlessly integrated into HTML pages, and a lot of developers - newbies but also seasoned ones - have been using this feature to create the most tangled and messy examples of spaghetti code.

Indeed using a single php file for connecting to a database, fetching some results, doing some operations with them and then displaying them via a HTML table just works but this is not sufficient to make it a good coding practice. Imagine a lot of huge, monolitic scripts each including n others almost equally complex and tangled: the picture you get is just some very disorganized code which still works and maybe is even fast to run, but it's a real nightmare to maintain and debug.

One thing PHP code developers and Zend in particular didn't do until recently was try to bring order to the chaos and create an official framework offering some sort of structure and conventions to make PHP application easier to maintain and develop. It seems that finally something is happening with the Zend framework but perhaps is too late already: the new Zend framework is still under development while there are a lot of various alternatives out there which are stable enough to do wonders, and “CakePHP” is undoubtedly one of the most valid.

CakePHP - An easy way to organize your web project

CakePHP was originally born as an attempt to port the architecture and functionality offered by “Ruby on Rails”:http://www.rubyonrails.com/ to PHP, something which various other frameworks have tried to do in different ways. Although Cake has many similarities with the popular Ruby framework, it's currently evolving independently: it's not an actual port - that would be close to impossible, considering the features offered by Ruby itself which are not present in PHP - but rather a very PHP-specific implementation of Rails' architecture and RAD philosophy. CakePHP separates itself from the rest of the PHP world by concentrating on simplicity, portability, flexibility and scalability. CakePHP does not require any additional libraries like PEAR or Propel. CakePHP includes an architecture that allows for easily extending its many built-in features through components and helpers. All this in under 300K.

The only really important concept to grasp is its MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture, which is actually common to many other PHP frameworks - including, recently, the Zend's. If you're new to this very intuitive and yet powerful concept, imagine to logically divide your web application in a few major sections (controllers), like a blog, a photo gallery and so on. Each section will obviously have access to one or more tables in your database (models) and will also include some template files (views) used to present content to the users. This may be a quite informal but concrete representation of the MVC architecture, using a real-world example. In other words, controller files handle your application's business logic, keeping it separate from the code used to represent the datasource (model) and the presentation layer (view). This separation may seem a bit too strict at first - you may be tempted to try including some business logic in your views, for example - but will be able to increase your code maintainability in the long term.

CakePHP can be freely downloaded from the official site and requires no installation at all: just extract the content of the compressed archive file into a public directory of your webserver to deploy the framework and your project's skeleton. The directory structure of CakePHP is designed to be easy to understand and well defined for intetlligent code seperation:

* app/ * config/ * controllers/ * models/ * plugins/ * tmp/ * vendors/ * views/ * webroot/ * cake/ * config/ * docs/ * libs/ * vendors/

To an extent, even someone who is not familiar with CakePHP can understand roughly where each particular file should be placed. There are three first level folders: cake containing the framework itself, app which hosts an empty project and vendors which can be used for third-parties libraries. It's worth noting that when creating a project with CakePHP you'll never have to touch the contents of the cake folder: the framework's source code is always kept separated by the user project. One of the most important part of Rails' philosophy Cake ported to PHP is convention over configuration, in fact there's no need for dozens of configuration files or no hidden settings to configure: the framework knows where everything is and it's smart enough to load the appropriate classes depending on a particular task, and of course a fixed directory structure plays a key role for this smart behaviour.

There are only two configuration files which can be modified, one is app/config/core.php and contains various application settings like the debug level, session timeout, etc., and the other - app/config/database.php - is necessary to establish a (persistent) database connection:

Listing 1 – Toggle plain text mode – Select listing

<?php
class DATABASE_CONFIG
{
var $default = array('driver' => 'mysql',
'connect' => 'mysql_pconnect',
'host' => 'localhost',
'login' => 'memouser',
'password' => 'userpassword',
'database' => 'memo' );
var $test = array('driver' => 'mysql',
'connect' => 'mysql_pconnect',
'host' => 'localhost',
'login' => 'user',
'password' => 'password',
'database' => 'project_name-test');
}
?>

Again, nothing too difficult to understand. Cake supports natively various commonly used databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite, and uses a wrapper for database abstraction layers like AdoDb or PEAR::MDB. Once you edit this file, CakePHP will be fully functional and you'll be able to start developing your application.

CONTINUED >

Tags: rad, framework, mvc, rails, yty, cakephp, ntier, development pattern

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New Comment

Ok, but there are real aplications made with Cake? (#90)

By Salva Maine on 2006-05-30 18:50:57

Recentlty I looked in the Cake site, but I didn't find any real big aplication mede with it. Does this mean that there are not many developers working with it?
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salva maine