I know that I said I was intent on never programming in PHP again, but that’s what our company uses and that’s what WordPress is written in. 

When I reviewed CakePHP, the Zend Framework was very young (I think it was like version 0.6). It’s now in version 1.5 and very capable. It has all the Model-View-Controller (MVC) components as well as a plethora of web services libraries that were very easy to implement. In just a few hours, I took the YouTube library and created a topic specific video browser on my other blog. The documentation was good and there is plenty of community support.

I like how it stores the core code of your application out of the path of what is publicly browsable. It gives it a more clean secure feel. I also like that installation basically consists of copy one directory to your web server – however, it only runs on PHP 5. Caching in the Zend Framework is just a few lines of code, making it a no brainer when it comes to web services.

It does have a few trade offs. It doesn’t have scaffolding or auto form creation like the other’s have. It’s newly implemented Forms library is a little cumbersome. It’s database support, while varied, feels less than integrated.

I think all in all, it’s a great framework. I haven’t touched Cake since 1.1, so I can’t compare it to their current version. I would recommend it to any PHP developer. If you are interested, check out Killer PHP’s tutorials.

Anyone compared it to the latest version of CakePHP? Any new PHP frameworks out there that rock and roll?

YouTube – Ruby on Rails vs PHP – RailsEnvy.com Commercial #3

This video is hilarious. And oh so true. 

Determined to never code in PHP again, I set out to choose between Ruby and Python. Both have very powerful feature sets for languages that are for the most part scripting languages. Many things went into the decision – a topic for another blog post, but I decided Python was the language I wanted to use moving forward.I had played with Python in the past, but in a few short days I went through the first 9 sections of the tutorial at python.org. Having coded for the better part of 10 years, it wasn’t difficult to pick up.

Immediately after this course, I jumped into Django. Django is the Python equivalent of Rails (Rails uses Ruby) or CakePHP for PHP. It has many similarities to Rails and a few differences. I’m still in the early learning stages of Django and only made it through the Pragmatic Programmer book with Rails, so I’d say I’m not yet qualified to compare and contrast the differences completely.

Two of the biggest differences from a development standpoint is URL handling and AJAX. URL handing is handled manually with Django and automatically with Rails. Handling URLs manually allows the developer to do some pretty amazing things, but it requires the developer to maintain url.py files. As far as AJAX, Rails has built in support meaning you are tied to the Prototype JavaScript library while Django allows the developer to use their own library of choice – I prefer jQuery. This choice means you have to handle all the AJAX yourself rather than leaving it to the framework. However, using views this is pretty painless in Django (views are equivalent to controllers in Rails).

Hosting is another difference to consider. I won’t go into all the ways that one could run Rails or Django, but I will say the most popular method for Django is mod_python for Apache. However, most web hosts don’t offer this as a default. And because of the popularity that Rails has achieved, more hosts are offering Rails hosting more than mod_python hosting. A lot more could be said on this topic.

All in all, I think either choice has some pros and cons. Hopefully more and more developers will migrate to one or the other and leave PHP behind. Good PHP developers will love the power and true object oriented nature of both Python and Ruby. Bad PHP developers should leave the coding up to professionals.