So this is not going to come as much of a shock to people experienced with CakePHP, but I’m just learning now and liking what I’m seeing. CakePHP 1.3 has a really nice set of conventions to work against and provides a seemingly pretty good scaffold for most typical webapps, so I’m thinking I’ll be making some more progress with that. Questions I still need to resolve include:
- Does it support jQuery easily enough (CakePHP uses Prototype/Scriptaculous as its default framework, but has provisions for using others)
- Is the Ajax-y goodness baked in enough?
- Will it really be flexible enough to accommodate my needs?
As part of this I also ended up installing Xdebug, since that’s the default debugger for CakePHP. I must admit, the things I really like about it so far are:
- Ease of install (instructions here got me up and running and a couple of tweaks to my Eclipse PDT setup (which supports Xdebug out of the box – nice!) found here and here got me the rest of the way). The tailored install instructions that analyze your php.ini, provide the correct download and customized install instructions is the coolest thing for a newb like me to get up and running quickly! ;]
- Code coverage analyzer! I’m not sure if Zend Debug is able to do the same thing, but that’s way cool!
All in all, looks like I’ve found me a framework I can be happy with – finally! ;]