Home »
Sometime back, I posted about my first experience with CakePHP. I installed the framework and went through the tutorial on building a simple blog application, and said “I was quite impressed”.
Now, after 3+ development weeks trying to build a real-world application, I think, maybe I was too hasty to draw that conclusion.
That’s right, I’m still on my CakePHP journey. I’ve been spending quite a bit of time now trying to match what I want to build with how to go about doing it in CakePHP. We all know that the blog example is pretty simplistic - a real world app won’t be quite so straightforward. At the moment, I’m trying to build up an intranet of sorts, with lots of different independant apps, and it’s driving me crazy… How would I structure the it? Should I use ‘plugins’? The folders, the views etc. Yes, it’s all still a big mess.
In any case, I found that CakePHP has a really nifty feature that really helps with sorting out the mess, and it’s called “scaffolding”.
This is probably going to be the first of many postings of my exploration with CakePHP. This post will briefly look at the CakePHP’s ‘Associations’ feature. Associations is “the relational mapping provided by the [CakePHP] model”.
In non-Cake speak, we’re talking about standard SQL joins - the mapping of relations between SQL tables. As you may know, doing SQL joins can be quite messy with unwieldy SQL strings. Thankfully, CakePHP provides a very simple way of joining tables.
Finally, I found some time to take CakePHP for a spin. I’ve heard some really good things about it, and I’ve been trying to get some time to try it out. I installed the framework and went through the tutorial on building a simple blog application. I have to say I’m quite impressed.