Launching CakePlate, a boilerplate CakePHP distribution for fast web apps

http://cakeplate.posterous.com/launching-cakeplate

by garbowza • 16 years ago

40 33 16 years ago

cakeplate.posterous.com

ConceptDog• 16 years ago

'fast' and 'CakePHP' shouldn't be used in the same sentence. Cake is great for RAD (Rapid Application Development) but the framework itself is massively bloated to almost the same level as a full CMS.

You'll get to market faster, but you'll also be planning a rewrite or migration sooner should you enjoy some degree of success.

garbowza3• 16 years ago

Could you expand on what you see as the bloat? I find the base distribution of CakePHP to be very lean, and using it on half dozen production projects, I have found no issues with speed, especially with proper use of memcached and media compression.

noodle6• 16 years ago

http://avnetlabs.com/php/php-framework-comparison-benchmarks

noodle6• 16 years ago

agreed. i like codeigniter, which is an order of magnitude or two faster than cake.

DanHulton• 16 years ago

Consider Kohana, then, which forked off from CodeIgniter years ago and learned from the many mistakes CI made (most notably being a complete inability to adapt), and was designed with PHP 5 in mind from day one.

rynop• 16 years ago

I sort of agree with you - if you need twitter type scale, you will need to rewrite.

Most frameworks are bloated (not setup to REALLY scale) out of the gate.

CakePHP is very flexible, and if used correctly can scale for 99% of workloads. Especially if you leverage some of the php5 only nuances (cake 1.3 has been developed to support php4 and php5).

CakePlate can steer you in the right direction - but is not an end all. It helps turn your idea into reality quicker. If your idea twitter scales, then you have cash to throw at the (good) problem.

If you give Cake an honest shot, I'm confident you will like it.

qeorge• 16 years ago

I'll bite. I write CakePHP apps for my clients, and I've heard this "cake is slow" meme before. Never been a problem for us, and we've shipped a lot of apps.

In almost all cases, the benchmark was done with no caching. I don't know who launches web apps with no caching, but they shouldn't be doing benchmarks.

I don't concede that Cake is slow for any meaningful definition, but as a matter of point - I'll trade faster developers for a couple CPU cycles any day of the week.

Griever• 16 years ago

This is excellent. I've been wanting a similar PHP version of the Html5Boilerplate for some time now. If this saves me as much time as the Html5 version, I'd hop on this in a heartbeat. Seeing more PHP frameworks take this approach would be a great thing, I believe.

The RoR commmunity has had this opportunity for quite some time now with Thoughtbots' Suspenders (https://github.com/thoughtbot/suspenders) template.

mgkimsal2• 16 years ago

Why not some form of user self-registration and admin management tool as well? I see a facebook connect in there, which helps, but a pure cake-based user reg/management system would go a long way towards a faster 'out of the box' experience.

garbowza3• 16 years ago

CakePHP comes with that out of the box. You can use the built-in Auth component for registration and user management, and the "Bake" tools will give you the option of creating admin functions, similar to Django's.

mgkimsal2• 16 years ago

Coming with an auth component vs something that provides pre-done models, views and controllers are two different things. Having something provided out of the box with some common defaults that I don't need to configure would be much handier for rapid development.

sunny36• 16 years ago

I use CakePHP (actually forced to). You can't compare the bake tools with Django admin. The UI of Django admin is usable in fact it's actually nice. I've had lot's of clients who like it. But the generated CSS by the bake tools is non-usable. I usually end up having to write the views for admin when using CakePHP compared to not having to do anything much when using Django.

josegonzalez2• 16 years ago

You might want to update your copy to state that you are using the 1.3.6 version of CakePHP, and not the 1.3.3 version.

As well, Bitly and Tinyurl would be better served as Behaviors or Datasources, but that's a separate discussion altogether.

Good job otherwise.

garbowza3• 16 years ago

Good catch! Fixed.

joshfinnie• 16 years ago

TL:DR

Find code here: https://github.com/rynop/CakePlate

Launching CakePlate, a boilerplate CakePHP distribution for fast web apps

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