HAs anyone had a play with it? Whats the general consensus on it? Its looking very much like "PHP on Rails". If so I would like to write something like Drupal on top of it. Probably wouldn't take too long ether i"m guessing...
Sat, 09/29/2007 - 14:20
Re: CakePHP?
don't know much about it..
i've heard some good things about codeigniter though. can't say much more other than that.
out of curiosity. how / why are you going to put drupal on top of it?
MVC platforms like codeigniter (and i imagine cakephp) are designed to roll *new* apps quickly and from the ground up. Trying to roll this into drupal seems counter intuitive unless i'm missing something?
Re: Re: CakePHP?
Well, its really just an API. You still have to design a system to work on top of that. Drupal is the mix between an API and a System design. I think the API is a bit boring to use, to an an entiry you have to code up a module, and 3-6 functions to do the basic stuff. In Cake you'd just create the table and your away. "Rapid" as they say.
I like the core Drupal design but they have made a lot of decisions which slow the whole thing down and these mistakes are starting to compact making it worse with each patch. The good news is that there are thousands of modules for it and you can usually work around what ever is bugging you, but there are comprises and the more modules you use the more spaghetti it becomes, more of a nightmare to manage.
I'd like to make a redesign of Drupal and sit it on CakePHP so that the API is maintained by someone else and I can just think about the system at a high level while getting all the API upgrades fro free.
I guess my main grip against Druapl is that they did every thing themselves instead of using things like PEAR DB, which would make Drupal run on all major databases instead of just 2 and give developers a mature DB API instead of its current baby one which results in hundreds of lines of junk code and just slows you down generally as you have to massage the data to and from the DB. Its Soooooooo boring.
anyway, back to it...
Re: Re: Re: CakePHP?
FYI. Codeigniter is supposed to be rapid app too.
I have to admit that for all of drupal's flexibility (e.g. a gazillion modules to do a gazillion things via a fairly pluggable and open api), it's core feature / benefit - flexibility - is also it's achilles heal.
There are too many modules that "try" to do the same thing and often none of them do "that thing" well or what i would call 100%. The net result is a lot of extra code bloat.
This comes at the expense of slower site performance. It also means that 100 related modules surrounding a concept exist when only one or maybe 2 solid ones need to exist to carry out the functionality. I find that last point to be a kicker for me because the design and quality of a lot of that code isn't always thought out ideally. and it takes too much (wasted) time to find out whether or not the existing code base can do what it is you want.
It would be a big boon if developers worked on making a few modules better / rock solid than reinventing the wheel every time. I understand why they don't sometimes. Because it's faster and because sometimes they think they're going to improve on the existing lot. But that's not always the case.
CCK is a great example. It has matured into a solid module which has put many other modules to death. It's not perfect and probably adds a little performance hit, by i can do a lot with a little creativity without having to research 2000 modules.
Overall, i can't complain about drupal. Like everything in life there is a tradeoff to everything. They chose flexibility and open module architecture and that is also its beauty.
Sounds like you want to write at the drupal core level without really having to code at the core api 
. I understand your desire.