Last year, I had a goal to learn Ruby on Rails and build an application in that framework. By learning CakePHP, I was able to wrap my mind around the rails framework concepts and make that transition a little easier. This year, I have made the full plunge into the Ruby on Rails, and I absolutely love it. As I’ve made the transition from php to ruby and from CakePHP to Ruby On Rails, I’ve written down some of the reasons why I now use Ruby on Rails over CakePHP.
[note: I still prefer to use CakePHP over no framework if a client requests an application be written in php. However, when we have the option to start the project in Rails, we really push for rails.]
Here are some of the reasons why I prefer Ruby on Rails over CakePHP:
Rails doesn’t require you to grab all of your data in the controller
When working with CakePHP, you must retrieve all of your data from the database in the controller and pass it all to your View. All of this data is stored in an associative, which makes accessing your data very easy, but lacks the functionality of using an object.
All of the data that you will need from associated models must exist in the array(s) that you pass to your view. You can grab data from associated models this by using Cake’s recursive option which will grab all of the data in surrounding models.
Lets say that you have an Author that has many Articles, Articles have many Comments and you would like to grab the Author, her articles, and comments to give to the view. You would do this with the recursive option of 2 levels of data retrieval. However, lets say that the author also has many books and books have many chapters. When you do a recursive find on the author, it will grab all of the articles and comments, books and chapters. This leads to a lot of wasted data retrieval
With Rails, you can easily walk through the data models while your are in the view, and if the object doesn’t yet have that data, it will automatically query the database behind the scenes. This is a beautiful thing. So, in the controller, you only have to grab the author. In the view you can then walk the model in the following way:
author.articles.first.comments.first.email_address
Of course you can iterate through the articles and the comments, but you can continue to move to associated models all you want. Also, to save queries to the database, you can do an eager find and specify that you also want her articles so that the articles are also returned in that first query. That is super powerful!
Rails model objects allow for dynamic attributes
Lets say that you have a User model that has the attributes of a first_name, and last_name. When displaying this information, you often want to show the full name. You might just output the first name then the last name every time, but wouldn’t it be nice if you just had a full_name attribute? In rails you can do this by defining a new method named full_name on the User model which returns the formatted full name. In Cake you can’t do this because you only have an associative array.
Lets say that the users have an image associated with their record. The image path on the server can be derived by their user id and an image extension which is stored in the users table. The path would be /images/users/[id].[image_extension]. In Rails, you can define a method on the User model named image_location which returns the formatted path. In Cake, you would have to formulate the path inside the view every time you wish to display it.
Further, if the user had no image, you can check for that inside your image_location method for the image_extension and return a no_image.gif when appropriate. In Cake, you would have to wrap some logic around your image display inside your view which makes it much uglier and prone to bugs.
Rails Has Superior Url Routing
[UPDATE: Ben has just notified me that Cake has now added similar routing capabilities. See his comment.]
Rails has amazing routing capabilities. At first glance, it appears that Cake can do everything that Rails can do, but it can’t. One of the main differences is that Cake’s routing is a one-way routing. Another difference is the way that Cake handles parameters passed to the controller.
One-way routing
Cake’s routing is one way, meaning that you set up your routes in the configuration, and then you must remember your url structure and write the urls yourself throughout the application.
For example, if you are building a social application which features personal profiles. You decide to name your controller ‘Person’ and the action to view the profile ‘view’. Each person is identified by a unique id, so you decide to use the default routing in cake and rails which would give you a url of /person/view/33 for person #33.
Throughout your Rails application, you’ve linked to the personal profile pages by calling link_to(persons_name, :controller => 'person, :action => 'view', :id => persons_id). This builds a url using the default route /person/view/[id].
Throughout your Cake application, you’ve linked to the personal profile pages by calling echo $html->link($persons_name, "/person/view/".$persons_id); . This also gives you the same url: /person/view/[id].
Down the road, you realize that you would like to make your urls more friendly, and represent personal profile pages with a url like: /friend/[id].
In rails, your new route looks like this:
map.connect "friend/:id", :controller => 'person', :action => 'view'
In cake, your new route looks like this:
$Route->connect('/friend/*', array('controller' => 'person', 'action' => 'view'));
It appears that Cake can do everything that Rails can do, but what about all of your urls that you have scattered throughout your application. Rails will automatically write them to fit this new routing pattern. Cake makes you find all of your links and change them by hand.
Rails has two-way routing, where Cake’s routing is one-way.
Parameter handling
[Correction here: You can accomplish similar parameter handling capabilities with Cake. This becomes a null point. You can still concatenate a querystring to the end of the url and use $this->params['url']['param_name'] to retrieve your parameters].
Cake handles parameters on the url differently than rails. With Cake, your parameters are listed like so /find-person/[param1]/[param2]/[param3]/[etc.].
In your Cake controller, you accept the parameters like so:
function find_person($name, $city, $page)
The order in which they appear on the url determines which parameter they become in the action.
Rails checks to see if the parameter matches a url definition in its routes, and if it doesn’t fit there, it will append it to the end of the url in a querystring like so: /find-person/?name=x&city=Provo&page=3.
In your Rails controller, you would access the paramters like so:
def find_person
name = params[:name]
city = params[:city]
page = params[:page]
You might think that Cake’s way of handling the parameters is superior because it keeps the url looking prettier. However, this can be a real pain if you are writing an advanced search where any of your parameters can be optional. It’s also nice to be able to use a form with the method=GET for search. I don’t know of a way to do this in Cake. See the above message on how to do this in Cake.
There are still other reasons for using Rails over CakePHP, and there are some reasons why clients will still prefer to stick to php. What are some of the reasons you prefer CakePHP over Rails or Rails over CakePHP?
