CakePHP is the PHP equivalent to Ruby on Rails. There are quite a few PHP MVC (Model, View, Controller) frameworks for PHP, but I chose to experiment with CakePHP because it seemed to have a pretty complete list of features.
I had started writing a Twitter mash-up in Ruby on Rails, but then after my interview with Alex Payne and some tests our IT guys ran in our hosting environment, I was convinced that Ruby is hard to scale. I was also frustrated learning Ruby at the same time I was learning the Rails framework. Therefore, I thought a PHP framework would be better, since I know how it scales and I’m very intimate with coding PHP.
The similarities between CakePHP and Rails are very striking. I would say the Rails script/generate functionality is a little more polished than the bake.php script in CakePHP but most the elements associated with the various components are the same.
I was able to basically recreate most the code I had written in Rails in the CakePHP environment in less then an hour. I still have very limited experience with both and haven’t gotten into using CakePHP with AJAX yet.
There also seems to be far more documentation of the Rails environment then the CakePHP environment. I think that having so many MVCs in PHP is hurting any single one from growing mass adoption.
Does anyone have some insight into comparables?