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Comment by tmh88j | Hacker News Reader

I'm very comfortable using CakePHP. I've built many apps using knockout.js on top of it, extensively used jQuery and AJAX throughout and have used both MySQL and MongoDB to drive the data.

For someone like me who is confident in their abilities of another MVC framework, how much of a learning curve is involved transitioning over to ROR (or any other MVC for that matter)? Has anyone switched from say Django, CakePHP or MVC4 over to Rails, or vice versa?

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I switched from Django to Cake to ROR. There isn't much difference structurally, as all of them are after all MVC architecture, but there are little subtle things which bring about the difference in feel and usability. Cake is heavily inspired from Rails but it doesn't focus much on command line as Rails does. For any common command you have which will add files, there is a command to in Rails to bring about that change and generate ALL THE RECOMMENDED files at once. These include test files, migrations, css, js, helpers etc. This makes life much much easier. Plus, ruby feels much pleasant when compared to PHP and thus, you won't regret switching to here. It'll take 2 days to be able to create a workable app. Although you'll find a new concept in Coffee script (Which is basically using ruby syntax for JavaScript), but you can easily switch back to JS if you want by removing the extension. Come over to the dark side, you'll love it.

I've been thinking about giving rails a chance. I'm in the middle of a project using Cake right now, so I think when I finish it I'll start checking out ROR.

> For any common command you have which will add files, there is a command to in Rails to bring about that change and generate ALL THE RECOMMENDED files at once

Maybe I'm misinterpreting this, but it sounds an awful lot like Cake's bake functionality.

For you ROR guys, here's a short tutorial on baking with CakePHP.

http://www.jamesfairhurst.co.uk/posts/view/baking_with_cakep...

Yes, it's very close to Bake functionality, but has many more commands. For example, if I remember correctly, there are no migration files in Cake and you have to do the changes in database manually. Try the migration feature of Rails, you'll never go back again.

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