You have some valid concerns. While the core team has made improvements to
the documentation over the years (the 1.x book is really a mess - the 2.x
one is better; same goes for the API), it still takes a lot of digging and
experimenting to get a good handle on how the core itself works (rather
than just learning to use the core). And learning how the core works is key
to using the framework to its full potential, in my opinion.
Regarding helper usage, however, the "different way" you mention
($this->Helper instead of $helper) was already available in 1.3 as the
preferred method for accessing helpers. The core team did advise developers
that, as of 2.0, $helper would stop working.
At any rate, if you don't like all the arrays, you should be happy to hear
that version 3 will be moving to objects for query results. But, then
again, if you're not a fan of a lot of change between versions, you
probably won't like 3 for a lot of different reasons. :)
- Jamie
On Saturday, August 18, 2012 4:08:55 AM UTC-7, Raffaele Sgarro wrote:
>
> I don't consider myself a Cake developer. I did a simple app (blog alike
> with a gallery and multilingual support) with 1.3, and while everything
> works as expected, there are lots of hackerish things that make the whole
> thing feels like dirty. So I'm taking the opportunity to rewrite the app
> from scratch on the 2.0 version. In the meanwhile I experimented with lots
> of other languages/frameworks/philosphies (like Play/Java, Play/Scala,
> Spring/Java, Ruby/Rails, Wordpress and other PHP stuffs, Android), plus I
> knew Cake 1.x, so I expected a more streamlined process than the first time.
>
> On the contrary, I first faced the new need for directory names being
> Uppercase (I know the PSR0 thing, just can't imagine why they only in the
> world chose this ugly and cumbersome convention). Then I found that helpers
> must be accessed in a different way, so my layouts were to be rewritten.
> All the way here, nothing that could not be budgeted with a major version
> change...
>
> But, hey!, the development still feels slow! All framework classes are
> full of magic variables sparsely documented (API? blog tutorial?
> Cookbook?). Still I can't get the Cake way of doing things. Still I feel
> like plain old PHP development (à la wordpress) is simpler and faster, so I
> wonder why one should depend on all this boilerplate. And what a passion
> for arrays! Arrays, arrays, arrays everywhere! I never saw such a heavy use
> of arrays in a library, which in PHP is particularly tedious, because the
> array "literal" is array("key" => array("key" => "value")), and because
> arrays can't even be dereferenced. For example, I read that the
> TranslateBehavior doesn't translate models other than the principal, which
> makes it quite useless... So I thought I could improve the code, but hey!
> here you a fantastic 631 lines file (
> https://github.com/cakephp/cakephp/blob/master/lib/Cake/Model/Behavior/TranslateBehavior.php)
>
> with its usual load of arrays of arrays of arrays :P
>
> So far, my frustration, but I'm not here to spit out my complains. I
> really think that if a framework applies successuful ideas (MVC pattern,
> Convention over Configuration), and is used by thousands of developers in
> the world for their businesses, maybe I am wrong, maybe I am approaching
> the framework from the wrong part, maybe Cake is limited by PHP and we PHP
> developers are damned to a "less sucking" experience at maximum... Or maybe
> it's just that the documentation is badly organized. Anyhow, can you,
> experienced and proficient Cake devs, share your thoughts on this subject
> and maybe suggest a learning path? I know that the usual answers are "don't
> bother and just use whatever language/framework you are productive in", but
> I'd like to make Cake my framework of choice for developing PHP stuffs, so
> I want to be sure it's not suitable for me before giving up and only work
> with better designed languages than PHP
>
> Regards,
> Raffaele
>
>
>
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