Long Overdue

posted by: Nate :: Nov 7th 2006, 11:35

Okay, I admit, this is more than a little belated. What can I say, I've been lazy.

I was in New York at the end of September to promote CakePHP, and I had a pretty darn good time. Thanks to all who attended the session at NYPHP, thanks to Seth for putting me up on the couch, and thanks to the guys at 9m for letting me use their office as my base of (evil) operations while hanging out downtown.

Except for a few technical difficulties in the beginning (stupid VGA adapters...), the presentation went pretty well. You can check out the slides here. After the show, I got to share a few beers with my PHP security hero, Chris Shiflett.

During the presentation, I talked about why Cake gets it right, why most other frameworks get it wrong (and it looks like other people agree with me), and some of the fun stuff we can expect to see in Cake 1.2.

While in New York, I also attended BarCamp, where I happened upon a lot of interesting people with some pretty amazing ideas, and a few Ruby elitists who thought they were just too cool for school, so to speak. ("Rubyist"? Are you kidding me!? Honestly, what the hell does that even mean? Maybe [Rubyist == Ruby + elitist].... just a thought).

Aaannyway.... I also got to hang out with some very cool people from the Village Voice who are doing some really amazing work with Cake. They're currently working section by section to convert their entire site into Cake.

I also delievered a presentation at BostonPHP, where Cake squared off against another framework called Opifex, which is based on Java servlets. Cake wowed the crowd when I demonstrated how easy it is to serve mutiple types of content from a single controller. I showed how the same controller actions can be used with both HTML and forms, and XML data. In Cake 1.2, the RequestHandler now detects XML requests, converts the POSTed data to an XML object, and makes it available in the controller as $this->data. And the 1.2 Model now speaks XML, so $this->data can be passed directly to Model::set() or Model::save() in either case.

Just for fun, (since I had so much extra time), I also demonstrated how to output model data as RSS or JSON; again, no changes to controller code required. For the benefit of the viewing audience, I put together a hand-out that goes over the basics of CakePHP.

In other news, we recently released Cake 1.1.10, and barring a few utility tasks, we now turn most if not all of our attention to developing and pushing out a dev version of Cake 1.2. Now just so we're clear, I'm allowed to talk about Cake 1.2, but you're not allowed to ask about it, or Larry will bite you in the face, hard.

As for the utility tasks mentioned above, we're working on support for a couple of new databases, including Oracle, and possibly DB2, courtesy of the venerable Daniel Krook.

So that's about it for right now, but we've got some more big announcements coming up, so stay tuned.

Update: Seth took some pictures of me presenting at NYPHP. This was before I shaved.

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