Addons.mozilla.org to move from CakePHP to Django in 2010

http://micropipes.com/blog/2009/11/17/amo-development-changes-in-2010/

by praxxis • 17 years ago

55 17 17 years ago

timdorr• 17 years ago

Didn't know they were running CakePHP, but I can understand it being insufficient. Unfortunately, its attempts to copy Rails have left it as a framework designed for the wrong language. It's OK for beginners, but not something you really want to get locked into.

Good luck and godspeed on the migration, AMO.

mrinterweb• 17 years ago

I unfortunately have had way too much experience with CakePHP. It is the second to worst framework I have used. Second to .NET 2. CakePHP trying to emulate Rails while supporting PHP was an idea destined to fail especially when trying to support PHP 4.x.

scorpioxy• 17 years ago

So what do people around here recommend for a php framework? I normally use and love Django, but I would like to add a php framework into my toolset.

loudtiger• 17 years ago

but... but i thought django was only for making blog engines!

i kid, i kid...

trevelyan• 17 years ago

"When it did work it would return enormous nested arrays of data causing massive CPU and memory usage (out of memory errors plague us on AMO). When it didn’t work, we’d end up doing queries directly which kind of defeats the purpose."

For what it's worth, I believe a lot of these issues are solved with 1.2 (AMO claims to be still on 1.1 which is at least two years old now). It sounds as if their system is just defining relations in their models and letting the database layer pull up all the objects for them. Which of course creates problems. They should shift to using "contains" to limit the depth of the objects retrieved.

The only real issues I've run into in the most recent version of Cake have been an inability to define a separate join table on one of the basic relationships (hasMany?). I seem to remember rails making this possible through an intermediary table, but it is somewhat advanced in any case and the easiest solution ended up being to write an SQL function in the model and use that to fetch the data. It was not hard.

Good luck to them with the re-write.

qeorge• 17 years ago

Agree, it sounds like most of their issues were solved in 1.2. Huge nested arrays definitely sounds like they aren't controlling the recursion level properly, which is quite simple in 1.2 as you mentioned. Caching is also quite painless in 1.2.

Its too bad for such a high profile project to bail on Cake without giving the new version a try. It really is an excellent framework for many projects.

mahmud• 17 years ago

I am equally surprised by both choices. I rarely visit the site consciously, but I often end up there through internal firefox redirection, say, after an automatic addon update. Given Mozilla's marketshare, a very popular addon can easily spike the site's traffic. The recent security issue removing the Microsoft .NET plugin is a good example.

Seems like they have the resources to keep php and python running under duress.

benreesman• 17 years ago

well shit, the python guys could use some good news.

mattbondellio• 17 years ago

The reasons given in this post show the ineffectiveness of the AMO development team.

I worked at Yahoo and I’ve used different Java and PHP frameworks in the past, some good, some bad. However, that never stopped us from having a continuous build running locally and an integration build running on our server, or from unit testing our code, even though we had to extend and adapt some components and unit testing frameworks. The same with debugging, it never stopped us from creating awesome tools to debug our code and monitor the performance of our applications.

After finishing building a CMS using Django, I can only say one thing: A framework doesn't make you a better programmer. If you suck, you suck.

Addons.mozilla.org to move from CakePHP to Django in 2010

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