The Bakery Everything CakePHP

Background and project objectives

In mid 2008, at the “Instituto Nacional de Educación Tecnológica” (INET, http://www.inet.edu.ar/) we began to evaluate the performance of the management systems used by the organization’s Information Unit. Among other responsibilities, the Information Unit maintains the data of the Federal Register of Institutions of Professional Technical Education in accordance with Law No. 26,058. The Register is a list of approximately 3,500 institutions that offer technical education throughout the country, containing basic information for each one (features, location, address, telephone, director’s personal data, etc.) as well as further information about courses, degrees and certificates granted, enrollment of students in each curriculum, and so on.

At the time, information had been maintained through two complementary applications: a Web application developed in Java used for updating information, and a desktop application developed in Visual Basic 5 for data query (using a scheme client / server). Oracle 10g was used for data management.

Existing developments were limited so it was necessary to perform a series of modifications and upgrades to facilitate the area’s work and improve the quality and quantity of information available. The problem was that the teams who had developed these applications and designed the original database were no longer working for the institution. Moreover, in addition to being heterogeneous as far as their language (Java, VB5) was concerned, these applications were developed without using similar design patterns, standards, or frameworks –all factors that would have made maintenance and updating tasks much easier.

To resolve the difficulties encountered and improve the quality of systems in the short and medium term, we elaborated a work plan which included:

1) Migrating systems to a new technology platform (Linux Ubuntu Server, Apache 2, PostgreSQL, PHP, CakePHP)

2) Redesigning the database (since the existing data model had many limitations)

3) Developing a new application which integrated prior developments, improved their services, and enabled continuous improvement and maintenance.

Development

We started working on the project in late 2008. Between October and December we defined the new architecture for the application, redesigned the database, and developed a basic design of what the new application should be like. All these tasks paved the way for the development we carried out throughout 2009.

In January 2009, two people joined the work team: a DBA who was a manager of the new technology platform, and a developer. Interestingly, the programmer had good knowledge of PHP but had never used CakePHP, so he was trained in the new technology during January and February. We started developing the new application in March. The entire development cycle took 3 months -from March to May. In June, the new application was put into production on the INET intranet, and replaced all previous developments.

The development was highly successful. As a result, the institution authorities decided to strengthen the team in order to continue the ongoing improvement of the new application and extend the computerization of systems to other INET areas. To this end, two new programmers were hired in August. As in the previous case, the new programmers had good knowledge of PHP -as well as programming in general- but not of CakePHP, so they began studying the Framework. Again, within a very short period of just over a month –less than expected¬– new programmers were able to join the application development with no setbacks. Collaborating towards this rapid integration was our most experienced programmer, who served as mentor and leader of the rest of the team.

In 2010 we expect to expand the development team, as well as continue the maintenance and improvement of the application developed. We also wish to initiate new developments for as-yet non-computerized areas connected to the Register of Institutions, where in some cases new programs will be integrated as modules in their present development and in other cases, they will operate as separate applications with one same central database.

The role of CakePHP

CakePHP was critical to the project’s success. Here I emphasize what we consider are some of the main advantages to using the Framework.

It offers many useful, ready-to-use tools. CakePHP prevents us from having to “reinvent the wheel” every time. For common problems that must be solved when using an application of medium complexity, CakePHP already provides a solution. In our case the most useful features were: authentication (auth), session management, automatic data sanitization, data validation at the model level. Its different Helpers also proved quite useful: HTML, forms, pagination, AJAX, Javascript, etc. This is actually just a partial list of the utilities it offers. Furthermore, if a solution cannot be found in the core, one can always check the plugins.

It promotes the use of standards and design patterns. Using CakePHP greatly facilitates communication among programmers by providing programming conventions and use patterns, such as MVC, to organize an application’s components. This is invaluable in the medium term. When standards or patterns are not used, programmers write code according to their own discretion, which in the medium-term causes many maintenance problems. As we all know, each programmer codes differently. With CakePHP, one can quickly determine –and with quite a degree of certainty- where to tweak the code to change a particular view or functionality.

It has an active community. CakePHP has a large community which is beneficial when the team faces a difficult problem. We have made very good use of its mailing lists and online documentation, as well as “the bakery”. In this regard, CakePHP has a comparative advantage over other development frameworks which have closed or less active communities.

Among other results of using CakePHP we may mention:

It improves productivity. The productivity of the development team was somewhat surprising. While development is of medium complexity, the speed with which it was put into production was striking as compared to other projects of similar scope we had seen in our previous experience. The ease with which CakePHP allows you to implement basic functionality (common to any application) contributes to this high productivity.

It simplifies the incorporation of new programmers. Experience has shown that using CakePHP makes incorporating new programmers easier. The Framework learning period varied from one to two months. After this period, new members were incorporated into the development team smoothly. Its conventions, standards and use of design patterns greatly facilitate communication within the team, providing a shared, meaningful technical language. This benefit of using CakePHP facilitates the incorporation of new programmers, and also helps mitigate the effects of staff turnover, which is quite frequent in our segment of Argentina’s current labor market. With today’s intense competition, it’s hard to keep from losing trained human resources, but using CakePHP allows you to replace lost resources with less impact than that of other settings.

Programmers like it. In our case, programmers joining our team had no prior experience with CakePHP. After a brief training period, they all felt comfortable with the Framework, and several began to use it on their own personal projects.

Thus far we have gone over the advantages we found in using CakePHP. Certainly many of these advantages can be obtained using other frameworks and there are many currently available that are probably as good as CakePHP. But the point of these commentaries is not to compare frameworks: here we want to pass on our experience as a development team "in the trenches", with applications used by INET staff every day. In this context, we can say that CakePHP has been very useful and has perfectly fulfilled our expectations. We hope that our experience serves as guidance for other developers to evaluate whether to use CakePHP.

Project Management

Some final words in order to put our experience in perspective. CakePHP is an important part of the solution, but it is also no more than a tool that makes sense within a broader context. Our use of agile management methodologies has also been crucial to the project’s success. We used a combination of techniques, taking ideas from XP and Scrum and adapting them to INET’s characteristics and resources. The details of these methodologies and their adaptation are beyond the scope of this article; however this should be mentioned to avoid painting too simplistic a picture of what it means to develop a corporate application.

Román Mussi, February 2010.