With the web now flooding with many application frameworks, the process of software programming and development is becoming easier and faster. One of the most interesting I have passed into lately, the CakePHP framework. An open source rapid development framework for PHP using the famous MVC (model-view-controller) pattern. It provides the tools and helpers that can save you time without going deep into the application coding. Developing with CakePHP really sounds like a piece of cake!

As an assessment of any software I pass into, I usually check the projects that have been developed based on it.  And CakePHP shows a remarkable flexibility with their long list of websites including community websites, newspapers & online stores built on it.

A good start after installing and setting up the framework on your server, is this simple tutorial to create a blog. It took me about 10 minutes to build the whole thing up! Amazing! A blog you can view, add, edit and delete posts writing the minimal code.

Searching online, I found good resources for tutorials on expanding the functionality of CakePHP applications. The following is a list of some you will find very useful:

• The Manual (A must for starters)
• MissPHP
• IBM Technical Library (Detailed set of 5 tutorials)
• Actionshrimp (On using the Bake console)

Another interesting competitor zend framework, which has bigger community and was born earlier than CakePHP provides a similar experience. I shall also give it a try. The Joobsbox project, I worked on earlier, was built on zend. You can check a comparison list of known PHP frameworks here.

Give it a try. Its nice and simple.