CakePHP for big projects

We are evaluating some PHP Frameworks for a productive website. CakePHP looks pretty interesting but we have no clue if it fits our needs.

Basically when you check the documentation and the tutorials for CakePHP it looks really promising. Nevertheless there were always some things that bugged me with frameworks so far, maybe someone who already used CakePHP in a productive project could answer this questions for me?

• Writing/Reading data 开发者_高级运维for single records looks pretty neat in CakePHP. What happens if you want to read data from multiple tables with complex conditions, group by, where clauses? How does CakePHP handle it?
• Scaffolding looks pretty nice for basic administration interfaces. How easy is it to customize this stuff. Let's say I have a foreign key on one of my tables. When I create a scaffolding page, does CakePHP automatically create a dropdown list for me with all the possible items? What if I want to filter the possible items? Let's say I want to combine two fields into one field in the view part, but when I edit it, I should be able to edit both of those fields individually. Does this work?
• Do you think you were faster in development with CakePHP than with let's say plain PHP?

I've used CakePHP, Zend Framework and I've also written applications "from the ground up" with nothing more than homegrown classes and such. To that I'd like to mention that I use CakePHP regularly so, take that as you will.

• (Writing/reading data, complex conditions) You can certainly do everything you mentioned. Others are correct in that it attempts to abstract away SQL operations for you. I've yet to have a query that I couldn't translate into Cake's "parlance"; complex geospatial queries, joins, etc.

• (Scaffolding, complex conditions) The scaffolding is really only meant to serve as a "jump start" of sorts to help make sure your model associations and such are setup correctly and should not be used as a permanent solution. To that end, yes it will do a fairly good job at introspecting your relationships and providing relevant markup.

• (Faster development) Of course. There is a large community with a vast number of plugins or examples out there to help get you started. Regardless of what you pick, choosing a framework will almost certainly make you "faster" if only for handling the minutiae that comes with setting up an application.

It really depends on your definition of "large". Are you referring to big datasets? A very complex domain model? Or just lots and lots of different controllers/actions?

Writing/Reading data.

Anything you can do with plain SQL you can do in CakePHP. It may not always be very nice to do, but at it's worst it's no worse than straight SQL.

But you really shouldn't be thinking about queries. You should be thinking about your domain model. CakePHP implements the active record pattern. It works very well if your domain model maps nicely to an active record pattern. But if it does not, then I would not recommend CakePHP. If your domain model doesn't map to Active Record then you will spend a lot of time fighting the Cake way of doing things. And that's no fun. You would be much better off with a framework that implements a Data Mapper pattern (e.g. Zend).

Scaffolding

Scaffolding is temporary. It does handle foreign keys (if you define them in the model as well as in the database) but that's it. You can't modify the scaffolding. But, you can bake them!

When you bake a controller or view then you're basically writing the scaffold to a file as a jump-off point for your own implementation. After baking, you can do anything that you want. The downside of baking is that it doesn't update anymore when the models or database changes. So, if you bake a controller and views and you add fields to your model, then you need to add those fields manually to your controller and view code.

speed of development

In my case, I'm a lot faster developing a website in CakePHP then in plain code. But only if Active Record suits the application! See my first point. Even then, Cake is probably still faster, but I would be faster still with a better suiting framework.

Some other thoughts

large datasets

If you have very large datasets and big query results then Cake can be a problem. A find() operation wants to return an associative array, so all the rows are read, parsed and converted to arrays. If your result set is too large you will run out of memory. CakePHP does not implement ResultSet objects like many other Active Record implementations and that is a definite downside. You end up manually paging through your own data with subqueries. Yuck. Wich brings me to my next point:

arrays

Learn to love them because CakePHP does. Everything is an array and often they are large, complex and deep. It gets really annoying after a while. You can't add functions to arrays so your code is more messy than if CakePHP would have used nested object instances. The functions you can add to those objects can help keep your code clean.

oddities and inconsistencies

CakePHP has some real nasty stinkers hidden deep within. If Active Record suits your application then you will probably never run into them, but if you try to mold CakePHP into something more complex, then you will have to fight these. Some examples:

• HABTM through a custom model uses the definition from the other side of the relationship that you're working on.
• Some really odd places where your before/after triggers aren't called (e.g. not from an updateAll)
• odd Model->field() behavior. It always queries from the database. So, be careful about updating model data without immediately saving it to the database. Some CakePHP functions fetch data from Model->$_data and some use Model->field(). The result may be entirely different resulting in some very hard to track down bugs.

In short

I would highly recommend CakePHP even for "large" sites, as long as your domain model fits nicely on top of Active Record. If not, pick a different framework.

Since you are asking for opinions, then I have to say that I advise AGAINST CakePHP.

My biggest gripe with it, is that it's still using PHP4 (written in and code generated). So, why go backwards? It is compatible for PHP5, but the framework itself revolves around PHP4.

I would recommend taking a look at Symfony or Zend. Symfony being the best if you want more structure in place - it forces you to adhere to the MVC structure that it has established.

The alternative is Zend, but it's more of a 'do-it-yourself' framework, or rather more of a set of libraries. You need to put it all together yourself, and it doesn't have any strict structure like Symfony.

There are obviously other frameworks, but I recommend the fore-said. Another one that you may want to look at is Codeigniter.

CakePHP tries to abstract away the database, so you write very little SQL (however, you write a lot of SQL snippets).

The basic process is to define your models, then define the relationship between models (hasOne, belongsTo, hasMany, hasAndBelongsToMany). You can put any conditions or default ordering on these associations you like. Then, whenever you fetch a row from the database, any associated rows are automatically fetched with it. It's very easy and powerful.

Everything comes with a bunch of configuration options, giving further flexibility. For example, when fetching data there is a recursion option which takes an integer. This value is how many associations deep Cake should fetch data. So if you wanted to fetch a user with all their associated data, and all the joined data to THAT, it's trivial.

Pretty much anything can be overridden on defined on the fly, and you can always fall back to writing your own SQL, so there's nothing Cake prevents you from doing...

I've not found much use for scaffolding. The answer to your question is yes, it'll auto populate joined dropdowns, etc. But I've never used it as a basis to build an interface. I tend to use a database tool to populate data early on rather than scaffolding.

I've built and also maintain several web-apps on CakePHP, and it is without question faster than 'rolling your own'. But I think that's true of any decent framework!

Unfortunately one of the weaker points is the documentation. Often you need to Google for answers as the official documentation is a bit hit-and-miss at times.

Just go with Yii framework, it's the best in this category.

(Note: This is a subjective question. You are asking for opinions. So I hope you don't mind if I give mine.)

(Edit: Ops. I mixed Cake with CI)

I used Code Igniter a while back. It did everything it should and was fairly easy to understand. However, for big projects, it lacked features. Many CI proponents say that this is it's strength as it keeps it fast and can make little RAM. This is true.

However, after developing one application with it, I found myself looking elsewhere so I would not have to write code that must have been written before. I looked at CakePHP and found it too restrictive and automagical. In particular, I needed some kind of ACL functionality. This lead me to Zend Framework. I learned that it is loosely coupled. I can include only the files I need. I can also make use of Zend_Application for large projects. It's object oriented design is a must when developing and maintaining large projects.

Yes, CI and CakePHP helped me to develop faster than with plain PHP. However, there are much more powerful frameworks. I hear and see good things about Symphony. There are quite a few more. I'm sure others will point them out.