Well Mariano I don't blame you for writing that. I tried not to sound like a whiner, but evidently I didn't succeed, and I regret that.
As for contributing some documentation, as I pointed out in the earlier message, I do not think I am a good person to write about Cake because I don't properly understand the unifying concepts behind it. I have yet to see a decent set of explanations and examples which might help me properly understand those concepts. Maybe it's because I'm not sufficiently skilled in this particular style of object-oriented framework programming, or maybe I'm just obtuse, or maybe I really am a rotten whiner. I don't know. But let me say one thing, again not nice or polite, and yes, in advance, I apologize: I would never release so much uncommented and undocumented code into the wild. For my part, I created what I think is a nice little system in Cake, for a school, involving students, teachers, courses and schedule blocks. I recently posted in this forum something about my use of SQL views, using some of those multi-table joins. I wrote that in response to someone's question about the use of SQL views, which I think have a lot of potential to simplify complex queries and improve the ease of thinking about a database structure. My little application also features a specialized multi-record edit screen, styled for user ease. Getting that particular screen to work compelled me to reverse engineer the code for saving data from many-to-many relationships in Cake. I wrote quite a few revisions of the code and finally got it working properly. But then another client materialized, and I wanted to use Cake to set up his authorization system. Probably I shouldn't have done it this way, but I fetched a copy of the pre-release Bakery and used the auth from that. I got the authorization to work, but then I had to take a break from using Cake because it was simply too difficult for me to work with. Even relatively simple changes would have me scratching my head, and then while putting in the changes I would wind up breaking something else. If I had just had some more documentation, I think I would still be using Cake in the most recent parts of my current project. Instead I used one of those code-gen packages for Windows, which bugs the hell out of me, because it's intrinsically so inelegant and like a black box. But it does work. On that topic, the role of code generation in Cake is very unclear to me. Bake is very, very helpful in getting started, but it could do so much more, and it could generate code which would illuminate the very problems I've been struggling with. That can be one of the great advantages of code generation within a framework: it can be so helpful in showing a programmer how to code properly for the framework. A framework is not just about code. It's about an overall point of view and a style about how things can best be done when trying to utilize that body of code. I think the whole huge Perl system is a good example of this problem. How many people really understand enough to take advantage of all the much-touted Perl code that's available? Not many, I'm guessing, and I suspect that's why Perl has apparently fallen behind other languages such as php in popularity over the past few years. It's just too confusing. I've tried to show that I'm not just sitting on my rear end complaining about things. I sincerely believe that the lack of a certain minimal level of explanation and documentation is a serious, sometimes even fatal weakness, especially in a project as wide-ranging and ambitious as this one. Oh, what the hell. It's not my project. I think it's a very, very interesting effort, with a great deal of merit, but I fear for its long-term success if the documentation does not start to keep up with the coding. I am truly sorry to be so cranky, and I hope lots of readers will correct my egregious errors and general wrong-headedness. Thank you, Mariano, for taking a stab at straightening me out. Regards, Ralph --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
