@Zaky: I would have to say that I turn away more work than I ever get to keep in house for the very reasons you mention. If there is already something that does what the customer needs I don't want to reproduce it. For instance, I have some very specialized shopping carts which deal with variable content creation for printing. These specific carts are NOT built using cake they are built on .NET. Our sales team is constantly bringing me customers who want to sell their next great wiget thinking they can just host them on this .Net store. But they don't qualify to use the .NET variable based shopping cart for various reasons primarily the cart isn't built for static items, and as the data for the item is custom to a specific user a login is required, which just makes generic anonymous cart shopping difficult. Most of the time I help these customers setup a Yahoo, Amazon or some other store system. I definitely don't write a custom cake app. Do I have shopping cart and checkout features? Sure I do, but the client has to need a lot more than just a cart before I implement/deploy anything for them.
So of course we evaluate the projects before we take them on. And there are a number of possible deployments in a number of platforms, languages, databases, etc. These are often presented to the client as alternative options and most of the time the better option over writing a custom app. However if they have a need, and I have not found a descent solution that won't cost more than building an app. Then I have some say in what I am willing to manage for them. Quite honestly I don't want to write the next great blog system or shopping cart, etc. I want to solve real business problems for real business clients. Most of my cake apps are integration apps to deal with moving data between systems written by Companies that refuse to talk to each other or are just to big to care. The advantage of using cake here is I get a nice web front end to monitor/manage the integration as well as cron job support from the same code base via console. Sounds like over kill, and it probably is, I'm sure for most of it I could have used any number of other platforms or scripting languages. But I'm efficient in PHP and cake. The clients love being able to view the info via a browser with built in links that take them to the other systems. In other situations, the client doesn't want to have a bunch of different apps to manage what they do, and after they have a system up and going, they love the turn around time for new ideas. The best ones start as an integration between multiple systems. followed by feature request which eventually replaces one or more of these other systems and grows into an app that really fits what the company is trying to accomplish. I can't remember the last time I sat down to architect design and build an application from start to finish. It just doesn't happen like that. So in that sense your right. But the original post was more of a new client looking to deploy a new CMS. Without all the details I stand by my original post. With more details I'm sure I would have started with some other system. We don't have to agree! And there is nothing quite like a good debate! Check out the new CakePHP Questions site http://cakeqs.org and help others with their CakePHP related questions. You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CakePHP" 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
