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Richard's Blog - Design, coding and life in Japan

Richard

Back from the CakePHP Matsuri conference in Tokyo

Submitted by Richard on Wed, 11/04/2009 - 14:00

I had a fantastic time meeting other developers in Tokyo at the CakePHP Matsuri meeting in Shibuya Tokyo.

It was good to see how other developers were utilizing PHP and PHP frameworks in Japan. Especially when talking about how they have integrated with other technologies like CMS's and other API's. It also good being one of the few white people, as it meant I could get a lot of time chatting to the 2 core developers that were there.

CakePHP
I am not actually using Cake PHP even though I like it. I spent time talking to the guys why I didn't want to use it and others felt the same frustrations.

My biggest feeling was that it was too slow and memory heavy (I think this used to be the accusation of Rails for a long time also), I even saw blog posts of people who were getting out of memory issues on their small apps and another that said they found Cake up to 10 times slower than rails. One of the core developers sitting next to me said that could be the case depending on what you were doing.

My other big gripe is that it is so tightly coupled as a framework making it so hard to swap in other ORM's or testing frameworks etc - Rails has been guilty of this in the past seem to be going to great lengths in Rails 3.0 to deal with this...

There was one guy who put together a Suzuki sales branch that used an integrated WordPress and Cake system, which is similar to what I am working on with a Drupal/Rails REST API. I did question performance, but I think Japan has big enough hardware to boost this. He told me later that he was using 3 servers for this, 1 for the DB and 2 for the web server.

CakePHP 2.0
This is something I am looking forward to as there has been a promise of performance due re-factoring and making it compatible with PHP 5 and over only. There is also talk of passing real objects from ActiveRecord which is something I have been enjoying in Hibernate
Will I consider it then?

Yes! Definitely, one thing I am impressed about is the following in Japan and the community around it is vibrant and exciting - much like Rails meet ups in the US (But smaller of course). I am looking forward to the new release but until then I will be focussing on Symfony(which I heard Rakuten uses) and when faced with a new site to build in PHP.

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