I only have experience with Cake, but was and still am very interested in Symfony and CodeIgniter (although I have chosen to go with Cake for my current project). In a perfect world we would all have the time to devote to exploring and testing all options; in this case, the seemingly three big PHP "rapid development frameworks." There are a few articles that you can easily find via googling at various programming news websites and such.
As for my own analysis, I have a few main observations with Cake. One, the documentation is subpar; at least it seems to be in comparison to the other frameworks, especially code igniter. You will find yourself digging through source code and api to learn relatively basic things, which is fine, but a better manual would certainly be nice. A perfect example is the extremely brief description of the Access Control system. This is probably one of the most important parts of a web application, yet probably the worst part of the user manual. One possible reason for this is related to the fact that Cake is undergoing many changes/improvements. The jump from 1.1 to 1.2 is relatively significant in terms of "out of the box" functionality. While Cake has a devoted community of followers, many of whom author helpful articles/tutorials at bakery.cakephp.org, many of these are overlap each other, and can be a bit confusing. Additionally, any effort you may devote to adopt something in a bakery tutorial may be obsolete sometime relatively soon. Example: there are probably somewhere in the range of 5 user-submitted auth modules floating around the cake community right now, because 1.1 does not have any "out of the box" auth functionality. However, 1.2 does, but it is still in alpha. The alpha state of 1.2 leads to another problem: many of the tutorials written at the bakery and some of the other hardcore bakery sites (gwoo, snook.ca) are only for 1.2. Perfect example: on cakephp.org they host a few screencasts, many of which are specific to 1.2. The point here is that much of the community has already jumped on the 1.2 bandwagon and have left 1.1 in the dust. This will be all the better when 1.2 gets out of alpha, but for now, troubleshooting can be a pain. Still, in my experience, Cake is a solid framework. As citrus noted, cake's "automagic" is no doubt the thing that sets it apart from the other frameworks. You will also see this referred to as object relational mapping, or ORM. Cake auto-magically maps your objects based upon relatively simple definitions in your Models. Like I said, I haven't used CI or symfony, but this is generally the feature that sets Cake apart. (Apparently symfony has ORM, but I don't know a lot about it). The main thing I've heard about symfony is that it has a considerable learning curve. I would recommend taking a look at this: http://www.phpit.net/article/ten-different-php-frameworks/. To summarize the field: Cake has a strong ORM feature, but it is still young and experiencing a lot of changes, especially in terms of "out of the box" functionality. Symfony seems similar to Cake in that respect, but maybe with a little better documentation (?) but a steeper learning curve. CI seems a bit further along in development, with much better documentation that Cake, but no ORM at this time. In fact, I read a blog comment by one of the key CI developers, in which he admitted that this is the key area where CI falls short, and ORM functionality is planned for the future. Sorry this got kind of long. I haven't really felt like working yet today....it is Monday. Hope this helped. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Cake PHP" group. To post to this group, send email to cake-php@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cake-php?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
