CakePHP is an open-source PHP framework for developing web applications. It lets you build these applications much faster and also makes your task simpler by minimizing the requirement of building your application from scratch.
CakePHP, as defined by experts, is one of the most eligible MVC frameworks available today with three unbeatable features. All three features are a must in a web development framework and CakePHP does it with utter ease and keeps them available in the best shape.
The CakePHP model’s advantages and popularity have helped it gain a lot of support from the community – over 8300 stars and 3500+ forks on GitHub, plus a forum, and official as well as unofficial docs. Because of this support, CakePHP developers get motivated to work hard and come up with the CakePHP latest version to keep up with the ever-evolving PHP web development ecosystem.
Why Use CakePHP?
Apart from being convenient and flexible, there’s more to CakePHP which makes it a preferred PHP development framework for many. If you can’t decide if you should go with CakePHP web application development, here are a few reasons why you should:
MVC architecture
CakePHP follows MVC or ‘Model View Controller’ as its software design pattern. The MVC pattern divides your application into three major components. Each component is develop to handle different aspects.
- The ‘Model’ is designed to support all data-related logic that you work with. With model class, you can insert, update, delete or read the data from the database.
- The ‘View’ supports data rendering on the screen. It is used for all the UI logic related to the application.
- The ‘Controller’ processes and reacts to actions and can alter data before it interacts with the model (database). It acts as an interface between Model and View components. The pattern makes it easier to split logic and presentation which comes in handy for large applications and sites.
Convenient Extensions
If you are using CakePHP, you can easily extend your project with components, behaviours, and plug-ins. It allows you to create parts of the reusable code that becomes useful for multiple projects. By expanding the functionality using these components, behaviours, and plug-ins, you can create a generalized library instead of Cake’s extending core libraries. This library can be shared between different models, controllers, and views and can be used in other projects as well. Moreover, there are a lot of plugins, helpers, and components available for CakePHP users which are developed by well-defined conventions of CakePHP so you don’t have to write everything from the scratch.
Easy configuration
It’s one of the most important reasons why the majority of CakePHP users selected it as their web framework. With CakePHP, you just have to manage the database connections settings. Other than that, there isn’t any part of codes or configuration for which you need to state the location of the library or the specific URL of the website. All of these functions are automated in CakePHP, making your work easier and swifter to a significant level.
Object Relational Mapping
Object-relational mapping is a programming technique to facilitate data conversion between incompatible type systems in databases and object-oriented programming languages. Every table is represent by a class. These classes are responsible for the management of whatever happens with your data, its validity, interactions, and evolution of the information workflow in your domain of work. The built-in ORM of CakePHP specializes in relational databases and can be extended further to support substitute data sources. CakePHP aims at creating a hybrid implementation to create a fast and easy to use ORM.
CRUD scaffolding
CRUD is taken from the main activities involved in most of the web applications namely Create, Read, Update, and Delete. It’s useful as it gives you a preliminary view of your application in just a single line of code. The bake.php core library has now changed /console/cake which makes it very easy to modify things as per the specific requirements of your application. The feature might be available in others as well but with CakePHP, it saves a lot of time.
Testing features
Though it might not come in handy to many, it’s an important feature for developers building large applications. CakePHP comes with the ability to create a test case to check your application and any criticality attached to it. There are two types of tests: core and custom. Both can be build easily. It’s useful for large applications where you might think of any part to be critical and the performance need regular checks.
Conclusion
Undeniably, CakePHP is one of the most popular PHP frameworks for development. It is an extensive, feature-rich framework. Besides that, it helps reduce the development costs and quickly build applications, using code generation and other scaffolding features.
The pillars, discussed in the blog, on which CakePHP stands, reveal that CakePHP is more ‘Strict’ than other PHP-based frameworks. ‘Strict’ here, implies that a user is ‘forced to follow a certain way of laying out the code. Therefore, it paves the way for the codebase to be more consistent, understandable, and readable.
There is no complicated configuration required, just set up your database and you are good to go! Moreover, most of the required features are built-in into the framework including translations, database access, caching, validation, authentication, and others.
