My research into CakePHP has, up to this point has been pretty positive. It seems to address most of the big issues I have had with other frameworks, and the code and tutorials all look good.
Because it was looking so good, I decided that I would go ahead and give it a whirl on an actual live project. I chose one that was small and urgent. (The urgent part may not have been wise, since for me personally cake is still unproven, but it seemed like a good fit) and I have been pounding out code for it since then.
So far I’m pretty happy with it, the code virtually never makes me cry, though I run into a lot of road-bumps almost all of them seem to be learning curve issues, and I haven’t actually gotten stuck on anything yet, just briefly derailed occasionally.
The Bake application that comes with cake, which is a small php script that lets you generate starting PHP code is really great for me, because it does cover a lot of gruntwork in a snap, though sometimes it crashes when I’m trying to generate specific models, but it’s probably good, for learning purposes, that I’m forced to write the occasional one by hand.
At the moment I still strongly prefer the smarty template engine to the way views are handled in cake, but the two are not incompatible, and it also may be just a case of me being set in my ways. Perhaps when I really get to know the helper functions a bit better I will be happier with this aspect of cake.
Oh, and the one thing that has caused me the most trouble so far is singular vs plural names. For some reason bake messes up the pluralizations when it is generating the rules for many to many models, and I don’t seem to have a feel for what should be singular and what should be plural.
Still, even with all the bitching I’m doing, I’m really happy with cake. I would say that development using it is going about on schedule, which is pretty good for the first time with a framework, and I feel like it is going to save me a lot of pain at the end with debugging and maintainability.