Wow, it’s good to see that you have no idea what you’re talking about.

To anyone reading this: As someone working as a core developer on *both* projects (CakePHP and Lithium), this post is factually incorrect and highly uninformed in many places.

P.S. I’m not knocking Rails – I think it’s a fantastic framework and have used it on a several occasions. I’m only knocking this post for being ass-backwards.

Ryan: I am afraid that your confusement or even worse – lost confidence is your fault. Fact that CakePHP and li3 projects do not share common future is in fact best thing for fans of both. Everyone can concentrate on things he likse, Isn’t that great? Btw, every OS project lives and dies with the community. I haven’t heard of anything from news that all CakePHP users died.

I agree with the versions. There was and is no instability, just some “instable” persons who wanted to abuse cakephp to gain some personal glamor and goals from cakephp.

A lot of people were against announcing anything named “cake3″ because everbody who can count knows that 1.x is followed by 2.

Well, those brickheads did it finally and the result was, as expected, a lot of confusion in the community. Your article here just proofs that. I’m sorry for that.

But ok, the persons who caused these trouble are luckily finally gone and do now their own thing. That was the best thing they did for cakephp in the last few month since all this cake3 was started by them in secret.

I won’t call “cake3″ anyways cake, it was not, as you call it, an overhaul, it was more a very experimental rewrite, but not cakephp anymore – in my personal opinion. Further i don’t see any advantage in already going for php 5.3. Don’t get me wrong, i’m really looking forward to use namespaces for example, but the real world moves slower then we tech-freaks would like it to. For example there still companies using php4 apps and the industrial world has just started to accept and develop php5 applications.

Begin itemized list:

0)

“CakePHP and PHP are seeing a defining moment as PHP tries to move towards an Object Oriented approach”

You do know that CakePHP is almost completely object-oriented in it’s implementation (and was pretty much right from the beginning when it first started in 2005), right? And that PHP has had a fully implemented, functioning object model since PHP 5.0, which was released in 2004 ? So how is it that we are just only *now* seeing a defining moment ?

1) CakePHP 1.2.5 runs just fine under PHP 5.3. There was a whole post to the Bakery that announced this (along with other things) at the time of the release, and it’s also contained in the changelogs, all the tickets that complained about it around the time when Snow Leopard was released (since it included PHP 5.3 by default), as well as noted on several other well known blogs & lists in the CakePHP community.

2) I thought it was a typo at first, but you repeated it several times. There never was a 1.5.3 release of PHP (it was called “Personal Home Page Tools” back then), and the 1.x version was released in 1995. Do you even know the significant differences between PHP 3.x, 4.x, 5.{0,1,2} and 5.3 ? And I don’t think this is being nitpicky. If you’re trying to discuss a topic that requires some precision in version numbers, then you might try and make an effort to get those version numbers right.

3) CakePHP 1.3 is not in beta. What was released at CakeFest was a ‘development’ release. Please look up general naming conventions for software release labelling (dev -> alpha -> beta -> release candidates -> gold master). For what it’s worth, we just released CakePHP 1.3-alpha the other day.

4)

” …incompatibility issues between Cake and PHP.”

Since CakePHP is 100% built on top of PHP, they can hardly be incompatible. I’m guessing you meant to say “incompatibilities between the versions of PHP that CakePHP explicitly supports”. Sentence structure matters. Of course, given point #2 above, this statement is no longer even valid.

Additionally, your post doesn’t even attempt to answer the pseudo-teaser-thesis that you state in your introduction:

I can’t see how this is anything but a bad thing for the project.

You never once state why the splitting of the two projects is a bad thing, save for two of the developers leaving. Have you ever taken a look at the contributors roster for pretty much *any* open source project out there ? There’s a huge amount of turnover, all the time. Look at CakePHP, Rails, Django, Zend Framework, MySQL, Apache. The list goes on. Just because some people move on does not mean that the project will die, and drawing a conclusion based on that is a logical fallacy.

I’ll never, ever knock someone for using a different framework or language. I’m language-agnostic in my programming preferences – I’ll use whatever is the best tool for the job. Learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails is great, and will only be a good thing for your career and understanding of programming paradigms and techniques. What I don’t like seeing are factual inaccuracies and clear misunderstandings such as the ones listed above.

Ok, so you are angry, I can understand that. I did mean gwoo, which you could apparently figure out but needed to be snippy about it, but that’s fine. I made corrections addressing many of your concerns. My experience with true object-oriented languages has been nothing like PHPs implementation so in my opinion, it is still trying to come to grips with it. Maybe that is completely off, but that has been my experience.

Hmmm, trouble on a OSS project because of egos, and it’ll probably forked out of usefulness? Shocked, I am.

All I am saying is that if someone was to get all ego-trippy on .NET 4.0, he’d be shot down in the street like the dog he was. Just offering a friendly suggestion.