Hiya Just a philosophical question: Our group is wondering if Cake's long-term philosophy is to have the tool perform as much "magic" as possible?
In other words, right now Cake does a fair bit "automatically" behind the scenes based on model data, table keys, file names, etc. It appears that this is increasing with 1.2 .. For example, it looks like the FormHelper class is making several assumptions about desired html control type in the absence of explicit parameters from the caller. The code shows it is checking the model field type and deducing a control type and/or is checking to see if the field type is a primary key and making some decisions based on that as well (generating hidden fields and so on) Also, the generation of a form tag is making a fair number of assumptions on the programmers behalf too. I think we are getting a bit nervous that Cake might be getting close to doing too much "automagically". There comes a point when a framework is doing so much to "help you" that it actually feels like the evnironment is full of side-effects, gotcha's, and booby-traps instead of being helpful. I think we would prefer that Cake do most things only when specifically told to do so, not as a "default", and would make as few assumptions as possible based on field names, types, primary key names, etc. I remember back when MFC was all the rage - it seemed great that the framework embodied/controlled the process of opening and closing files, reading and writing formatted data, handling multiple windows, etc, and that you just had to understand this process and know where/how to insert your code into the right spots. After a while we all fell very much out of love with this because the framework was no longer a "silent partner" that could help when you asked it to, but instead an entity that exerted a lot of influence over your application and if you didn't remember/know how to take all this into account you could not even get a simple application to work as expected in a reasonable amount of time. Each new project had to start again with a refresher of all the things one must remember/consider about the framework's expectations/assumptions about how an application should work and all the things it did "automatically" for you. We actually found that for small applications, more time was spent on getting our interactions with the framework correct than we did on writing our application and solving the business problem. We are a bit nervous that Cake might be heading down this same path... Any thoughts on this? Michael --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Cake PHP" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cake-php?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
