The Underscore Archives

Hi Tom,

>  Just my opinion after a week of frustration with Cake. It's seems really
>  great on the surface and there's a lot you can get done quickly, but the
>  documentation is so lacking generally and especially for 1.2 I found it a
>  very frustrating experience. I felt it took me down a great path and then
>  left me lost at the end when things got tricky.They also seem to have made
>  some really strange API changes (simple renaming of functions etc) that I
>  spent most of my time with my head in the docs. This, coupled with the fact
>  I didn't fancy a potential difficult job migrating to a production version
>  has made me ditch it.

fair enough with respects to the docs, though I feel it's slightly
unfair to compare a donation funded open source project like Cakephp
with the Zend, fwiw there's only one guy in the main in charge of docs
and he does it for free - the main tennent of any opensource project
would be "if you see something wrong, write a ticket and/or submit a
patch"

Over the last few weeks, the docs for 1.2 have got loads better with
http://book.cakephp.org/ (which will replace the manual I believe
soon).

As you had chosen to use beta software can you really complain about a
shift in the API?

>  I've now switched over to Zend framework and using their MVC. It's
>  substantially more involved to get going but the docs are a million times
>  better and once you're done it more or less gets out of the way. I
>  personally don't like frameworks that make me code my databases how they
>  want for the sake of saving me one line of SQL. A good example of this is
>  try to setup a user table in Cake that uses a username field as the PK (a
>  perfectly sensible candidate key). When you build a form in cake with this,
>  it knows it's the PK and will hide the field for you! Handy :)

you simply need to add a single name/value pair to the array of the input:

echo $form->input('User.username', array('type'=>'text');

it's true cake has tons of automatic/time-saving/restrictions (delete
as appropriate) aspects to it, as would any framework - except Zend
which is less a framework and more a base collection classes to build
a framework (imo).

cheers,

jon

-- 

jon bennett
w: http://www.jben.net/
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