OK, I know what you’re all thinking, “What about CakePHP?” Cake is undeniably an Olympic gold medalist framework featuring many similarities to Ruby on Rails. Ahhh Rails, I promise someday I’ll devote more time to you, but until then my programming world resides primarily in PHP. Sometimes you have to make the best of the hand thats dealt…

Which brings us to the lovely, elegant, graceful and genteel Kohana framework.

Enough fluff, I’m about to punch you in the face with some factualizations. Here’s reasons why Kohana has street cred:

1. The strictest OOP PHP has to offer
2. Dainty footprint, no extra libraries like PEAR
3. Locks down GET, POST, COOKIE, and SESSION with XSS protection
4. Auto-loads classes like butter
5. Orginization
6. Flexible and extensible
7. Godlike power over events
8. Rapid Application Development

Don’t believe me, download the framework and see for yourself!

First of all not having to support PHP4 means less code and enables more robust functionality for the framework. Auto-loading, for those of you who haven’t yet experienced its awesomeness, steadfastly promotes great justice. Gone are those agonizing days of having to use require_once() and the likes.

MVC, well we all know the virtues of MVC. Also, the RAD aspect is pretty rad as well.

Event handling enables you to poke your head in at almost any time during execution just to say hello or stay and enjoy a spot of tea, cherio.

Time for some snippets!

Here is a basic controller:

class Freshness_Controller extends Controller {
  function freshen()
  {
	// Load the view as an object
	$view = new View('freshest');
	// Adding variables to be displayed in the view
	$view->title      = "Welcome to Bennyfreshness's blog.";
	$view->heading = "Wow this is indeed extremely fresh.";
	$view->content = "I've never seen so much freshness.";
	// Render the view
	$view->render(TRUE);
  }
}

You get the point… Clean, concise code…

To bring this party to an end I’d like to end with some closing remarks. If you’re doing web application development in PHP I strongly recommend checking out Kohana. Its short learning curve, vibrant community, friendly IRC (#kohana on irc.freenode.net), and most importantly rich and robust code base will increase your productivity and you’ll have more fun while programming.

So how do you get me to go back to developing in Cake?

Take the letter “c” out of “cloth” and the letter “f” out of “way”

Wikipedia defines RAD as

A type of software development methodology which uses minimal planning in favor of rapid prototyping. The “planning” of software developed using RAD is interleaved with writing the software itself. The lack of extensive pre-planning generally allows software to be written much faster, and makes it easier to change requirement

Enough about RAD itself, lets get into some of the benefits.  Hold on to your terminal cassonova…

• Speed up development
• Write less code
• Focus on functionality, not mundane repetitive tasks
• Create a more modularized and organized project
• The acronym is actually RAD, which, itself, is pretty rad…

There are countless numbers of RAD Frameworks across all platforms.  Since this is more of an introductory post on RAD Frameworks we’re only going to go over a few basics.  This post will detail some aspects of CakePHP, one of the more popular PHP frameworks.  They describe it on their site as follows…

Using commonly known design patterns like MVC and ORM within the convention over configuration paradigm, CakePHP reduces development costs and helps developers write less code.

So lets dive right in, two basic but integral ideas…

MVC – Model View Controller, this is an architectural pattern which helps seperate business logic from presentation.  The model handles data.  The controller manipulates data.  And the view presents the data.

ORM – Object Relational Mapping, in a nutshell, gives you objects which you can play with instead of having to access database data directly.

Now to the nitty gritty…  Lets show you how to get CRUD (create, read, update, delete.. sorry for another acronym, hopefully last) up and running in no time flat..

Start with your database table.  Lets say you were selling books.  A typical book table might look something like this (simplified).

CREATE TABLE books (
id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
title VARCHAR(255),
author VARCHAR(255)
);

Once you have your config file (user, pass, database) set correctly, now you get to ENJOY THE MAGIC OF CODE GENERATION.  I can’t stress enough what this next part does for one’s mental health.

From a command line or terminal run the following commands..

• cake bake model book (creates your book model)
• cake bake controller books scaffold admin (creates your CRUD controller scaffolding with admin functionality)
• cake bake view books (creates all your views for CRUD)

Now, after three lines of code pasted into a terminal, you have generated a fully functional, extensible, modular CRUD application, including error reporting, user friendly flash messages, well, I hope you get the point..

The beauty of this is that you don’t waste time on mundane tasks, you can start hacking away on the unique functionality of your next killer app almost immediately.

Keep in mind there are a few more caveats and gotcha’s when working with a framework such as CakePHP, but generally you will find them to be a godsend in your web development world.  A world where heinous devilish monsters must be dealt with on a daily basis (IE6).

Please post questions, this is a VERY general overview but I’d love to go into more detail….