CakePHP – First impressions

My first framework after developing with PHP for 4-5 years was CodeIgniter, which I’ve been using for a while and have already dugg into it’s core to go on and make a lite version for personal use. For the past year or two I’ve been hearing a lot about CakePHP framework and have finally found some time to play around with it.

After spending 3 hours last night with the Cake’s online manual (although skipping basic stuff) and reading through the blog tutorial, I have to say I was impressed with CakePHP. Although the convensions could be somewhat difficult for new comers to remember, I have to agree that they are very useful and increase the development speed.

I have also enjoyed their support for third party classes (with javascript includes too!), very well commented API and plugin support:

CakePHP allows you to set up a combination of controllers, models, and views and release them as a packaged application plugin that others can use in their CakePHP applications.
Cookbook

CakePHP is a very good framework and I will start playing around with CakePHP next week to try and code a small forum and a blog for CodeVision.

In love with jQuery

jQuery is around for a while already, but only recently I actually sat down and decided to give it a go. jQuery website defines itself as:

jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.

After trying it out, going through jQuery wiki pages I have to say it probably is the best Javascript framework I’ve seen. I have tried mootools (not very recent though), scriptaculous, but jQuery just beats them all. It’s lightweight, very easy to use, has a bunch of ready-made plugins and a large community.

If you’re planning to do some Javascript, try jQuery. Meanwhile I am placing jQuery on my must-use list.