Petit four, the quick and easy online CakePHP baking tool

Petit four is an online application that allows you to design the models of your applications and then automatically generate a SQL database and the base files for CakePHP: models, controllers and view directories.

In our Web agency we have been glad to use CakePHP for almost two years as it has really helped us speed up our projects.

However from time to time there are still some tasks that feel a bit slow or tiresome, like creating the basics files to start a project, or add models on the fly during the development process. The console baking tool can be useful and has been improved over the years but has many limitations and you don’t always want to start it each time you add a new model to your application in order to bake a model, a generic controller and generic view files that you won’t necessary use as such.

That is why we developed a tool that allows us to speed up our modeling process by easily creating the models, their attributes and their relations and generating at the same time the SQL file ready to be imported in a database, and the CakePHP basic files needed to build an application on it.

Mind that this is only a beta version with a narrow set of functionalities. We focused on the first layer that is needed for any kind of MVC application: a database and models files. We throwed in the creation of controllers and view directories, because they can be useful, but as they are not always needed, we left them empty for the moment.