How different is CakePHP from Ruby on Rails? [closed]

CakePHP is like a cheap, bastardized ripoff of Rails. It tries to be like Rails without doing any of the stuff that makes Rails great. It kinda feels similar, I guess.

CakePHP has an Ajax helper that does something similar to the Ajax-related helper methods in Rails, so yes, in some way, it's also true.

But CakePHP is really an exercise in futility: its authors wrote it so they wouldn't have to learn Ruby, even though learning Ruby and Rails together is probably easier than figuring out the monstrous mess that is CakePHP.

(This, coming from somebody who does CakePHP at his day job.)

Since y'all asked, my biggest complaint about CakePHP is how it manages to totally butcher the conveniences of object-oriented programming: sure, it implements the Active Record pattern just as much as Rails does, but it makes you pass around data structures.

I feel like any logical person would implement an ORM using faulting and dynamic loading of properties in to objects, which is exactly what ActiveRecord (the Rails library) does. The whole idea of setting a member variable called $recursive to determine which relationships to load is just plain flawed.

Being based on PHP is pretty fatal, too; you can't do anything with global state, you have to depend on mod_rewrite, you pay the startup penalty on every request. Sure, there's optimizations for any environment you're using, but still. People say Ruby is slow, but my own Rails apps run faster than their CakePHP equivalents, last I checked. I admit to being without data on this.

Worst of all, the bugs in CakePHP just about kill it for me. I could tell any number of stories about

• the time we spent two days figuring out why CakePHP refused to connect to the right database host
• the time half of our pages went blank because of the memory ceiling from using too many components
• the amount of code that lives in our AppController because every component load costs several megabytes of memory
• the black art of massaging data structures to make XML output work correctly
• how we traced down the blank <javascript> tag that shows up at the end of every page

Cake is laid out much like Rails and obviously takes a lot of inspiration & ideas from it. Cake is a nice introduction to MVC frameworks and rails seems pretty straightforward coming from cake experience.

Ajax is super easy with Cake using the JS helper. In fact everything is super easy. Its a great framework, especially for distributed apps (eg cms's) or any other situation where the ease of hosting a php app is a benefit.

I would see the main advantages of rails being Ruby (and therefore the better OO implementation of rails etc) and the community. Gems (much fewer / less comprehensive cake plugins), training materials online, books (eloquent ruby anyone?) meetup groups etc.

I haven't worked with CakePHP, but my impression of it isn't too good. If you're after a Railslike framework for PHP, I think you may be better off looking into Symfony. It's probably a bit more complicated to get started with, but the whole project seems much better organised than CakePHP.

Of course, take with a grain of salt, since these things are quite subjective.