Oilfield App Needed in a Hurry
I was hired to design a new web application for an oilfield company. The trick was, they needed it in a hurry. After reading CakePHP's manual and going through the tutuorial, I knew this would be a piece of cake (pun intended).
The oilfield application I needed to design was pretty straight forward. Each client has a lease, and each lease has several wells. Since CakePHP uses the model-view-controller architecture, I knew the time required to design the base application would be minimal. With CakePHP's models, controllers, and a nice feature called scaffolding, I had my application running with user authentication in well under an hour. That's it! Of course, scaffolding is only a temporary solution, so I had to move on to the views.
Making HTML forms is really boring, but luckilly, CakePHP has a great HTML helper that can do forms, images, and all kinds of other tags. Within minutes, I had all of scaffolding replaced with my own custom pages. I wanted to use AJAX for the tools needed to administer the various aspects of the website, to give it that nice web 2.0 feel. I'm still pretty new to AJAX, and everytime I've delved into it, I spent most of my time pulling my hair out trying to get my project to work in the popular browsers. After using CakePHP's AJAX helper, I was relieved by how easy my interfaces came together, and thankfully, my hair remained spiked.
No matter what, you'll have to revisit your code to make changes, fix bugs, or add features at some point. Well, about a month after the site was live, I was asked to add some features. I had been working on two other projects in the meantime, and had completely forgotten about my oilfield application. However, after looking at the models and controllers it all came back to me. CakePHP allows for very modular programming (thanks to MVC), so it was easy to quickly add the features I was asked to do. My customer was shocked by how fast I was able to roll out the new feature, and to be honest, so was I.
CakePHP is great for anyone who knows PHP and is planning to develop any size web applications. The community is growing quickly too, and during my project, I had to ask a lot of questions on the CakePHP Google group. The answers were flying back at me. After a bit of reflection, I realize that everything about CakePHP is simply fast.
Making HTML forms is really boring, but luckilly, CakePHP has a great HTML helper that can do forms, images, and all kinds of other tags. Within minutes, I had all of scaffolding replaced with my own custom pages. I wanted to use AJAX for the tools needed to administer the various aspects of the website, to give it that nice web 2.0 feel. I'm still pretty new to AJAX, and everytime I've delved into it, I spent most of my time pulling my hair out trying to get my project to work in the popular browsers. After using CakePHP's AJAX helper, I was relieved by how easy my interfaces came together, and thankfully, my hair remained spiked.
No matter what, you'll have to revisit your code to make changes, fix bugs, or add features at some point. Well, about a month after the site was live, I was asked to add some features. I had been working on two other projects in the meantime, and had completely forgotten about my oilfield application. However, after looking at the models and controllers it all came back to me. CakePHP allows for very modular programming (thanks to MVC), so it was easy to quickly add the features I was asked to do. My customer was shocked by how fast I was able to roll out the new feature, and to be honest, so was I.
CakePHP is great for anyone who knows PHP and is planning to develop any size web applications. The community is growing quickly too, and during my project, I had to ask a lot of questions on the CakePHP Google group. The answers were flying back at me. After a bit of reflection, I realize that everything about CakePHP is simply fast.
Comments
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1 Simple the sweetest cake
I'll hold my hand up and say i still have to get my head around the MVC thing properly, but im still able to get web apps off the ground with little worry.
The support on both the main site,google groups and now here is also really great.
I cant wait to get the other developers in my office using CakePHP as the base of all our projects.
Oh how easy things would be then!
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2 Very nice
This is yet another accounted Cake experience that is pushing me towards using it (and I've been poking around with it for a few weeks now). I'm ready to jump in and build my first app with Cake .. everything about it is so appealing and *simple*..
Thanks for sharing your experience!