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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

For reference's sake, this article is written by Fabien Potencier, the creator of the symfony framework. This guy's probably single-handedly responsible for lifting the PHP community to a higher level, by making great software (which, when he started, was pretty unique, with horrible hacks-upon-hacks like CakePHP being the norm), and by showing people how to do so.

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A great part of Fabien's work is that he pushes people onto the latest releases. Symfony2 cannot be used without PHP5.3 which is great of keeping people's servers more up-to-date.

Frameworks such as CodeIgniter were guilty of keeping compatibility with PHP4 for far too long.

The world of PHP is a nicer place if you are on the latest version and are aware of the latest features such as namespaces etc.

It's a double-edged sword however.

Users stuck on PHP 5.2 will miss out on potential security fixes to Symfony 2. This can potential compound an already bad situation.

I'm not saying Fabien didn't have good reasons, more playing Devil's Advocate.

If only cheap shared hosting was consistently up to date :<

If a host doesn't stay up to date and doesn't let you stay up to date, you shouldn't be using it!

I'm referring more to end-users of PHP packages :/

I feel for you :(

If people are so incompetent that they can't choose a decent host or install a recent PHP (or deploy on anything but mod_php) then there is probably nothing that package maintainers can do to rescue them, no matter how much they want to.

End users need more help but there are lines between "end user" and "needs to learn things" and "stubborn idiot". If you want to write and deploy web apps, it is your JOB to choose a halfway decent host, keep dependencies up to date and deploy with some appropriate technology!

It's not reasonable to host symfony on anything less than a VPS. It can be done, but you can also punch yourself in the face.

Servergrove.com has the best options for symfony sites IMHO

Symfony2 is not compatible with php-5.2 and never was.

Python will be under the same situation when the big push onto python-3 finishes over the next ten years. The vast majority of applications runs on python-2 (for performance and backwards compatibility reasons), however that is changing.

For what it's worth, CakePHP was a hack to get PHP working as it properly should. Our base object class was made so that PHP4's broken object model would work as expected. It has also gotten a lot better, but has also taken a different approach to application development than many of the other available PHP frameworks.

Indeed a good point, fabien is the catalyst in the current generation of PHP projects, just take a look at Symfony2, Symfony CMF, Silex, Composer, Doctrine, ... they all spawned in the trail of his work. I actually wonder how he gets so much work done.

I think Doctrine is not related to his work. The Symfony CMF, while part of the Symfony community, has been mainly pushed by companies like Liip AG

Projects like Doctrine & swift mailer for email have been adopted and had development funded by Sensio @fabpot's dev shop.

So while not a tightly coupled part of Symfony they are related through developers, community, and funding

The recent PHP releases are nice, but is there any plans about .. pardon me .. rewriting the core libs ? I guess they're close to zero. Even with a nice Object model, traits, closures and literals .. whenever I see old core functions poke it hurts. At the same time the world has moved: Scala, Go .. PHP still looks odd to me, even with his new found maturity.

What's so horrible about CakePHP?

Its legacy (who wants to still support PHP4?). AFAIK, it's no longer maintained; I believe all the core development is now taking place on the Lithium project: http://lithify.me/

Isn't Lithium just a fork? CakePHP 2.2 was released just a few days ago and they dropped PHP4 support in 2.* I think.

It's not a fork, it's a separate project by 2 former Cake developers.

CakePHP 2.x did a major rewrite of nasty parts and dropped support for PHP 4. It's actually very well done and much more consistent now.

None of these things are true, I don't know where anyone comes up with this stuff. Sounds like a smear job more than anything. CakePHP2 is PHP 5.2.8+[1]. It's still being maintained and 2.2 was released this week[2]. Lithium is not a real 'fork' from Cake - rather it is a project that two of the Cake devs were working on as a 'next gen CakePHP' but decided to make into a separate project - the two frameworks don't share any code in their 'production' releases. Lithium has a much smaller community and is still poorly documented (as far as I can tell having tried to use it for a project).

[1] http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/appendices/2-0-migration-guid...

[2] http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/lorenzo/2012/07/01/cakeph...

> Sounds like a smear job more than anything.

Not at all. I'm sorry you misunderstood. Cake has been quite good to me over the years. Ever since I switched to Lithium I haven't looked back.

Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. I can see you posted this without doing so much as a single google search pointing your browser to "cakephp.org".

I am interested in hearing skrebbel's response to this question however (what makes cake so horrible).

Goodness. Sorry.

Perhaps I just misunderstood. To me it seems sold as the successor to Cake. http://www.meetup.com/lithium/

The Lithium folks (nate & gwoo in particular) split off from the Cake core team. There was some contention but generally speaking I think everyone is still friends. As for lithium being the successor to cake 1.3... well certainly nate & gwoo feel that way, that's why they built it. :) And certainly phpnut & mark_story don't feel that way, that's why they are still driving forward with cake 2.0. Anyway they are both cool projects but I was reacting strongly to your assertion that cake is "no longer maintained", which is as accurate as saying RoR is no longer maintained and has been officially superseded by Node+Express.

> AFAIK, it's no longer maintained

False. Last commit was 18 hours ago.

Admittedly, I used it a long time ago. Back then, it was obviously never really used by any of its developers for things beyond the trivial "Blog Tutorial". For example, you couldn't reasonably put model-related code in your model classes, because the model data (coming in from the ORM as nested associative arrays) were structured subtly different depending on how it came in (i.e. on which ModelPeer the query originated). This effectively forced you to make fat controllers and useless models.

Additionally, I know of no framework that reinvented more wheels than CakePHP.

yeah he has done an amazing job.

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