Please enlighten me.

http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/view/bindable-behavior-control-your-model-bindings

Read that article, then write tihs post again.

Cheers,
mbavio

Cake and Rails both follow a principle of “Convention over Configuration” which makes them a bit less flexible, but very easy to get up and running and to maintain. Zend Framework requires a lot of configuration, so you will spend a lot of up-front time getting your configurations right rather than building your core software.

Some people see Cake and Rails as a bloated framework, but I think their benefits far outweigh the costs of a large framework. Rails has cut down the bloat quite a bit in v2.0 by pushing a lot of the functionality into plug-ins. However the plug-in structure is really easy to maintain.

Did you try the Zend Framework at all?

Also, Ruby’s ‘gem’ library repository makes it a joy to install and use new libraries. I don’t find the same amount of quality libraries available in PEAR.

Because Ruby is and always has been a fully Object Oriented language, all of the code available is object oriented.

The same is not true in the PHP community. There are tons of snippets that are just plain old procedural code that is hard to reuse or extend. This leads to a lot of sifting through a lot of junk code when looking for an existing library.

Also, there are a ton of good Rails plug-ins that are super easy to apply to your application. Plug-ins work especially well in Ruby because you can re-open classes to inject functionality, and mix in modules to gain functionality. I believe the Rails community is larger than any community gathered around a single PHP framework. It is really nice to be able to find lots of plug-ins specific to the framework that I am using. I rarely have a problem finding a good plug-in for accomplishing common web-related tasks.

I’m not saying that Rails and Ruby are the only way to go. PHP does some things very nicely and has some good advantages.

PHP is very mature and there are tons of code and classes and stuff available for doing all kinds of things, so you don’t have to do it yourself.

RoR is still new, and have a smaller community, and I would guess that code availability is far from reaching the level that as of PHP. This means that you’ll have to do a lot of these things yourself - which of course means spending a lot more time programming. That’s why I’m skeptical with switching to PHP.

And besides, even having programmed a huge website over 5 years in PHP (and still developing), I haven’t found PHP unable to manage the complexity that the website requires - on the contrary, I love PHP/MySQL and it works wonder for us!

Having to unbind models is extra work that I’d prefer not to have to worry about, but at least it’s there so that you’re not pulling down the entire database to get to a specific piece of data.