Preview: ModelBaker (OSX) - Rapid Application Development for CakePHP

A few weeks ago, I was notified about ModelBaker by WidgetPress. The homepage made me quite curious, as they promise to be able to rapidly develop CakePHP applications from an OSX desktop application. Take a look at the screenshots and screencasts on their website. Or, take a look below, this is the part of the application where you describe your database.

As you can see, you enter the tables you want to use, the attributes validation and even relationships. ModelBaker gives you an overview about your tables and their relationship. Based on your information, the Models, Controllers and Views are automatically created. You can even add another model, User to use out-of-the-box authentication in your application.

You can add more helpers or components to be used in your application or even choose a template to give your application some nice looks. And hey, why not develop your application for the iPhone? - How should I do that? That would be taking hours or even days! - Not anymore, just enable 'Include iPhone & iPod Touch version of web application' and you're ready to go.

[caption id="attachment_83" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="screencast modelbaker"][/caption]

ModelBaker is still in development, 1.0 should be released within a few weeks. WidgetPress will be at MacWorld next month. I am looking forward to the first release, I guess this product will enable beginners to develop some basic wep applications en give professional users the ability to develop prototypes very rapidly.