The Underscore Archives

Sorry to be coming into this one a bit late I was away for a bit

/me puts symfony hat on

I've nothing negative to say about Cake, I looked at it for a few
hours but the Symfony documentation (8 months ago) seemed more
comprehensive so I opted for that on a project. Now that I've put the
(considerable) effort in to get up to speed using Symfony I see no
reason to switch; my code is better and I'm loads more productive
especially when building the backend (which takes hours rather than
days now even for complex schemas)

Anyway I figured it wouldn't hurt to answer a few of the points that
Jon raised just to provide some balance:

> Some of the basic reasons I went with Cake are:
> - php4 or php5

PHP5 only seems like a plus to me

> - not dependent on any external libraries like PEAR

It uses the PEAR package management system for install/upgrade but as
far as I know it does not utilise any of the pear modules themselves.

> - can be installed by simply uploading a folder, no command line needed

Symfony would be a pain to get installed on a shared server I'm sure
(though is apparently quite possible).

Also the Symfony command line tool kicks ass, automating lots of
tedious processes

> - only 1 configuration required to get started (and that's only needed
> if you're connecting to a - database), Symfony has a lot of config
> files

The majority of the config files are good to go out of the box, just
put the right DB credentials and you're good to go. But yes there can
be one per module if default behavior is not sufficient.

> - cake is faster

This was recently written by the guys that develop Symfony:
http://www.symfony-project.com/weblog/2007/06/11/is-symfony-too-slow-for-real-world-usage.html

In summary they state that 'hello world' benchmarks are not a real
world comparison. I've not personally done the benchmarking so don't
have anything to add to the debate.

> - Cake was written with RoR in mind

*shrug*

> - cake has a very active community, and a very approachable dev team

So does Symfony though I'd admit that the newbie 'it doesn't work'
type posts are likely to get ignored on the mailing list if it looks
like the poster hasn't tried very hard to invesigate the problem
themselves. IIRC the forums are much more forgiving

db

-- 
Darren Beale
07711 716 197

http://bealers.com