I wrote this as a response to a post on this blog – it has a lot of useful links and it also got me thinking.
I’ve been a full time PHP developer for 3 years now (ASP prior to that) – over the past few months I’ve been learning and writing a couple of sites in Cake.
MVC is quite a different way of working to the way most PHP things seem to have been built (and the way I have built my projects) – but when you persevere and everything falls into place you don’t want to go back.
I find myself constantly checking to see if the work I’ve done so far in Cake is up to the point where I can stop using our current CMS framework at work and move to a Cake based system – unfortunately it isn’t quite there – but it will be soo, and I can’t wait.
Personally the hardest thing I have found is the transition to getting query results as quite complex arrays rather than the simple flat results that you get from mysql_fetch_array.
The one thing that I have found invaluble (when dealing with multi table relationships) as an aid is to simply pr() the variable holding my results array into the view I’m working on so I can see the paths I need to follow to the data I want.
I’m undergoing the learning of CakePHP as well. It’s true that it really takes quite a bit of ground work to get going. But, now I realize my understanding is very good of the code that I wrote making it much easier to locate and make changes to my code. I really can’t wait until my knowledge of CakePHP is enough to build complex web applications. Rapid Application Development is going to open up a whole new door to my career.
By the way.. thanks for the articles you wrote on HABTM with CakePHP.