So who is Developing With Style?

It’s been a long time coming, but finally we have not one, but two books on the CakePHP framework about to be released.

The first from Packt Publishing, entitled “CakePHP Application Development” was recently announced on the Cake Google group and is out now.

This book offers step-by-step instructions to learn the CakePHP framework and to quickly develop and deploy web-based applications. It introduces the MVC pattern and coding styles using practical examples. It takes the developer through setting up a CakePHP development and deployment environment, and develops an example application to illustrate all of the techniques you need to write a complete, non-trivial application in PHP. It aims to assist PHP programmers to rapidly develop and deploy well-crafted and robust web-based applications with CakePHP.

The second, which is due to be published this month, is from Apress and is called “Beginning CakePHP: From Novice to Professional”.

Leads you from a basic setup of CakePHP to building a couple applications that will highlight CakePHP’s functionality and capabilities without delving too deeply into the PHP language, but rather what the CakePHP framework can offer the developer. Targets beginners of CakePHP or web frameworks in general as well as experienced developers with limited exposure to CakePHP. A secondary audience may include developers undecided on adopting CakePHP or business managers trying to assess the value of incorporating CakePHP into their toolbox.

Both books can be purchased and downloaded in PDF format, or in posted to you in paper form.

This is good news for Cake and its community, as good quality books can really help an open source project grow and mature. And of course, it helps those who aren’t familar with how the framework works.

So get buying and tell everyone.

In todays announcement on the release of CakePHP RC1, Gwoo mentioned the use of Ohlo and in particular, their Journalling feature. I hadn’t heard of Ohlo before, so I took a look. Seems a great idea, and touches along the lines of Github (but nowhere near as well). It’s basically somewhat of a social networking site for open source projects, and taps into each projects source control system to display changesets and activity. You can rate developers and users, and discover other projects of a similar nature, or with similar tags.

Anyway, I tried registering, but got an error when trying to login, and I have yet to receive my validation email. I was about to give up when I found this curious little box near the bottom of the CakePHP project page:

So according to Ohlo, if you wanted to recreate CakePHP in its entirity and copy everything it has, it woul take one person 24 years to complete, and cost nearly $1.4 million!

Now, I’m not taking away from the huge amount of work that has gone into the core by umpteen members of the community, but doesn’t that sound a little bit off to you? It seems they use some sort of mathematical calculation based on lines of code etc. But to be honest I really felt that that made a mockery of both Ohlo as a viable service, and CakePHP as a very successful open source project.

Anyway, I just really felt the need to let you all know about that one. I thought it was funny.

Today marks the release of the long awaited first release candidate of CakePHP. Hopefully this will mean a final release will be close behind.

Congrats to all involved. Keep up the hard work.

On a side note, Cake now has an official jobs board. Nothing on there right now, but hopefully we will see more activity on there soon. So if you are looking for bakers, please post on there.

Google has just released yet another API. But this time, the API is not interfacing with any of Google’s own services.

The Google Ajax Libraries API, is a content delivery option and loading architecture for the most popular open source Javascript libraries. It means that with just one line of code, you can load your favourite Javascript library into your web app, and not have to worry about keeping the library up to date. It also means the files are gzipped and minified for you, and takes advantage of any caching. This should mean faster loading JS includes.

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OK boys and girls; I just posted the first and hopefully only release candidate of Migrations v4.0. Get it while it’s hot.

This release includes a few bug fixes. In fact, it fixes most known bugs, and allowed me to close a lot of the bug tickets. There are only three or four left, which I hope to eradicate by the time the stable release comes around.

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