My previous develop used CakePHP after I explicitly asked them NOT to use a development platform that messes up the programming in this way. Now Im really frustrated as i cannot find or edit anything without getting cake to work (Which I cannot do).
I could really do with some help in understanding either why CAKE is better when it seems much more complex that simply programming in php etc, AND/OR how I can now extricate the project from the poison ivy of CAKE…?
Please advise.
Unless you have a LOT of custom logic, you’re almost certainly better off starting from scratch than trying to extricate something from a Cake project.
Cake takes care of 90% of the stuff you would have to write from scratch. So you have to re-write that 90% if you plan to get away from Cake. Since all the custom stuff you’re doing has been written to work with Cake, you have to rewrite or modify most of it too.
Hence, it’s unlikely you want to bother. One exception: the js, css, and layout files should still be largely usable with some minor tweaks.
Hire a Cake developer and let them take care of stuff if you’re not willing to learn CakePHP yourself. In this day and age, any developer who doesn’t want to use a framework is surely going to cost you a lot of money. Both in development time, and then later in maintenance and security.
Yeah, there’s definitely no way to “unbake” a cake app, but I understand the sentiment to an extent.
CakePHP is a fairly extensive framework and might often feel a bit overkill for smaller projects. Every time I start a new project, I consider whether it really makes sense to use Cake, but in 95% of the time, it totally does.
Even small projects usually aren’t as simple when you review them closely. You’ll spend a lot of time thinking about how to structure and architect your project, probably run against a few walls and waste a lot of time trying to reinvent the wheel. You’ll be writing boilerplate code for no reason (when it’s all ready to use in CakePHP) and then end up with something framework-like, but inferior to Cake.
Also, custom built apps have actually a much higher likelyhod of not working or breaking; The core of Cake is remarkably stable and secure, as a lot of talented people are constantly working on making it better.
So it’s a bit of an illusion that we all have sometimes, thinking that our project would be simpler without a framework.
That said, CakePHP is fairly difficult and time-consuming to learn, and there are also a few things that are more complicated to achieve than with pure PHP, but ultimately it’s more than worth it.
Thanks for your feedback guys, you have answered my question perfectly. Apharently I am going to have to learn CakePHP !!
Hi Tristan,
Perhaps look at the official CakePHP 3 Training that is taking place on the 20th July, its a great interactive session with a facilitator to walk you through the basics (set up) through to more intermediate work/questions you may have. There are also practical examples. Here’s the link - http://training.cakephp.org/