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)

in many respects horses for courses I suppose. But I'd definitely
agree that the constraints the of the framework with regards to coding
style, logic separation etc really make a developing with a framework,
a much more productive experience.

> 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

I suppose this is a matter of choice then. Sometimes I'm not in
control of the deployment environment, and having the option of either
without loss of features is useful.

> - 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.

ahh, my mistake :)

> - 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).

I suppose I question why a php framework needs to be even remotely
complicated to install, especially when cake makes it so easy - upload
a folder and you're done! You can of course tweak the location of the
CORE cake libraries, and your APPLICATION files, which is clearly a
good idea in a production environment.

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

cake has a similar command line tool, called 'Bake'

> - 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.

ahh, this may have changed since I last looked at it - got the
impression 18 months ago you had to manually configure an XML schema
for each table in the db.

> - 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.

yes, agreed there I think, as speed (and also scalability) are both
dependent on more than just a framework.

> - 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

same goes on the cake google group. people can flamed for not
searching properly for answers before posting up their questions,
reckon that's pretty similar across the all Open Source projects
though.

Cheers,

Jon