Breaking news: CakePHP 1.2 has been released!

What did the guys from CakePHP 1.2 do during these Christmas days? Well, they have been working hard to make CakePHP 1.2 final. It's finished, read the announcement at http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/view/the-gift-of-1-2-final.

Thanks guys, for getting this thing done, I guess a new era for PHP frameworks has started at the end of the year.

Thanks roryy for notifying us about the release.

Most of you will already be downloading or testing 1.2, for everyone else (interested in soccer), watch this.

Best wishes to everyone the upcoming 2009!

CakePHP 1.2 release candidate 4

Hey, did you already notice that CakePHP 1.2 RC4 was released?

Automatic inclusion of Javascript in CakePHP

Earlier, I wrote about $scripts_for_layout and I was looking for a solution to automatically load js files into your layout. Well, I think the solution might be in this presentation from Felix Geisendorfer. At slide 20 he starts talking about this.

Has anyone seen this, or did you already try it?

Let us know!

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.

PHP frameworks

Today I visited PHP frameworks and noticed a few PHP frameworks I didn't know yet. I know the mainstream frameworks are CakePHP, Zend, Symfony and CodeIgniter, but I saw some new ones I haven't heard of before, like Zoop, Prado, Yii and Akelos. Also, I read about Kohana.

I tried to get an overview of each framework, also the ones I already tried or heard about. The problem with this is that I am confused. I have used CakePHP for quite some projects and most of the time, it's great. But, I got the feeling there are some things returning in each or some projects for which CakePHP hasn't got the perfect solution.

CakePHP and most of the other frameworks are great for doing some database connection and helping you starting a blog in 15 or 20 minutes, but what's next? Does one of these frameworks have a killer feature?

I downloaded some of these frameworks and did a little testing. Little, not much, so everything I write down here is not based on some scientific report, but its just MHO.

There are a few frameworks I would like to test some more. Like Yii, Akelos, CodeIgniter and Kohana. Yii sounds great. Akelos seems to have a killer feature for me, the admin plugin. This enables me to create a database with my own tables (like CakePHP) but, extend this in a few minutes with a complete user/roles system including a great frontend. Akelos is definitely worth a few of your minutes.

[caption id="attachment_73" align="center" width="300" caption="Screenshot of Akelos admin plugin"][/caption]

This is it for now, maybe I'll be back with some more information on these frameworks, in case you have any experience you want to share the world, let us know!

Website usability testing

While looking into some Twitter accounts this morning, I came across a link to Silverback which was posted by quinns. It claims to be an application for Guerilla (or Gorrilla?) usability testing. The application can be used to test software or websites.

Check it out: DebugKit for CakePHP

I just found in my RSS feeds. It describes a very handy CakePHP plugin. DebugKit shows a toolbar in your application with information about the session, sql, load time and more.