Ruby on Rails has inspired a lot of admiring imitators. In theory you can keep on using Python, Perl, PHP, Java, or C# while reaping the benefits of the Rails model. Ruby fanatics will tell you that the language’s intrisic qualities are part of the bargain, which may be true, but all this activity is not just faddishness – Rails is essentially doing evangelism for a structured style of rapid development that is unfamiliar to many people.
I’ve been on Web Application Framework Safari for the past couple weeks. The new hotness is Ruby on Rails, which has inspired lots of imitators. Not necessarily a bad thing. Because I do so much PHP work I was curious what kind of work had been done to bring this style of development to PHP. I found CakePHP.
I’ll say this for them, they write good enough documentation that I actually had a working mini-site at the end of the first tutorial I tried. Pretty good compared to some of the projects I’ve seen with more high-minded architecture and no usable documentation at all.