i’m spending some time these days beefing up my PHP and web-app development skills. my background is client-side software development, so the server-side thing is still relatively new to me, and the web model (stateless request/response) has taken me a long time to get used to. mind you i’ve been able to code things in it, but i’ve always felt like i was just hacking things together — i’d never get that satisfying feeling of writing elegant, well-designed code.
meanwhile i’d been hearing a lot about ruby on rails, which looks intriguing, but i’m put off by the excessive, self-aggrandizing hype. also, the more i read about it, the more i realize how much its value is really about rails (i.e. the framework), as opposed to ruby itself. with that in mind i decided to investigate some of the php-based clones of RoR, including cake. from an educational point of view, it’s been more helpful to look at cake rather than ruby on rails because i only have to learn one thing (the framework) instead of having to learn two things at once (a new language and a new framework).
anyway, with the help of cake, and a lot of online articles about MVC and other design patterns in web apps, i’m starting to feel more comfortable about developing for the web, and how to code things without feeling like i’m just throwing several disparate pages together. i’m still not using any of the available frameworks, but i may after i have mucked around enough on my own.
