CakePHP - What Do We Know About It?

Before we get on to the details about cake PHP, let us at first know what CakePHP is all about. It is actually a web application framework that is open source and follows the customary MVC (Model View Controller) business. It is written in PHP and follows the concept of ROR. Alternately speaking, it is a PHP framework for rapid web development that generally uses certain common design patterns such as ActiveRecord, ADP or Association Data Mapping, Font Controller besides following MVC. It is basically a PHP equivalent of ROR.

The framework is extremely useful when it comes to seamlessly creating static pages, more so when it comes to creating controller for these static pages or defining action for each of them whenever needed. Therefore, technically speaking CakePHP is a foundation structure that can be used for creating web applications. The primary objective of the framework is to help the developers to work in a quick yet structured manner, with losing any flexibility.

If the task of web development was somewhat monotonous, CakePHP has taken out that element of monotony, by offering a wide range of tools for coding as well as specifying logic into the application. So let us go through the features that CakePHP comes up with:

• The framework is active as well as extremely user-friendly so that even the ones who are new in development can deal with it without any hiccup whatsoever
• It is flexible as well as compatible with PHP version 4, 5
• It comes up with integrated CRUD for database integration, it supports scaffolding of applications, helps in code generation
• It features certain build-in validations along with a request dispatcher with some clean custom URLs, routes
• It is pretty fast and it supports flexible templating with helpers for PHP syntax, AJAX, HTML forms, JavaScript and much more
• It also supports data sanitization as well as flexible caching

The USP of the framework is that it is designed to provide a tough enough base or foundation for any application. It is designed to handle each and every aspect – right from an initial request by a user, through the process of development till the final rendering of the web page in question. Again, as the framework is designed to follow the MVC principles, it allows seamless customization of the pages and extends to almost every feature of an application.

It also offers a basic organizational structure, helping in structuring of filenames as well as the names of the database tables, which in turn helps to maintain the consistency along with the logic of applications. This is a simple, yet quite powerful concept, especially in the question of maintaining the overall health of an application.

Now let us go through the basic tasks that can be done with the help of CakePHP.

Data Validation

This is an extremely vital component of any application because it helps to guarantee that the data that are used in a particular model sticks to the business rules or the terms and conditions pertaining to the application. This may include validating the user ID or password or checking out the uniqueness of the user names used.

Data Sanitization

It also helps in data sanitization. The Sanitize class that CakePHP comes up with can be utilized to free the data submitted by the users from the malicious or erroneous data and other unnecessary information. Sanitize is essentially a core library, and hence can be utilized anywhere within the code, though it is best used in models or controllers.

Error Handling

In case any unrecoverable or irretrievable error occurs in any application, it is a rather common practice to halt the processing mechanism and display the error page. For that what is needed is separate code error handling for each controller and component, which is a tedious as well as time consuming task. CakePHP saves a developer from this laborious job by pre-defining a series of error-types. One of the most common as well as useful error types is ‘Error-404’.

Debugging

It is an inseparable part of any software development cycle. Though CakePHP does not come up with any tool specifically for debugging or tools that have anything to do with Editor or IDE, it does offer a string of tools that help in debugging indirectly, though not directly; displaying whatever was running at the back end of the application. CakePHP also helps in debugging, caching, logging, testing, localization and internationalization, pagination and REST (Representational State Transfer). You can hire developers from PHP development company who can help you build web apps within allocated budgets and time schedules.

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