Studying CakePHP 1.2 so far…

Posted by Tengku Zahasman on July 5th, 2007 filed in CakePHP

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CakePHP logo I have made some intensive self-study on the CakePHP 1.2 framework for the past few weeks. The learning curve that I had to go through has been quite tiring and troublesome, in an interesting way that is, since CakePHP 1.2 is still undergoing development and there are too little documentation on this version if compared to the stable version 1.1.

Cake 1.2 doesn’t have any practical manual (yet) like version 1.1. So learning this version means having to dig deep through their source files and reading the description headers for functions, going back and forth with their API documentation, browsing through the Bakery, hanging around in their official IRC channel to ask for guidance and posting quick questions, and then lots and lots of Googling around too. Yes. I find out that learning a new framework is not all easy. It takes time. Because I found out that learning a framework is almost like learning a new programming language altogether even though you already use PHP as your mother tongue. Frameworks have their own built-in functions to memorize, their own naming conventions to follow, their own unique approaches to methods and classes to get used to which are mostly way different than the usual way we write applications. But even though learning a framework is not a snap, the benefits you get after mastering it is just priceless.

There are many differences I could see in Cake 1.2 if compared to 1.1. More components added in (Auth component for doing authentications is now included! And helpers for Pagination, RSS & XML too! Oh life is getting so much easier~ )… file structures have slightly changed… tremendous change in their Model validation technique (will discuss this in later posts)… and some other changes which you can view them all here.