Aditya’s Blog

The 6th Nagpur PHP Meetup was concluded on December 5, 2009. This time it was more practical oriented and thus the format was changed to a workshop rather than just casual discussions or presentations.

Most of the companies working on PHP in Nagpur are still sticking to the old fashioned PHP programming where PHP and HTML are mixed together or are at the most using templating system like Smarty to separate their view logic.

Abbas Ali from SANIsoft Technologies, through his workshop titled “Starting with CakePHP Framework”, introduced CakePHP, the most popular PHP framework, to the developers in Nagpur. He started with an interactive session on the need of MVC in programming, separation of business logic and view logic, etc. and then moved on to explain the same in relation to CakePHP.

The actual demonstration then began by showing how to download the framework from CakePHP website and setting it up in webroot. Since the workshop was about getting started with CakePHP, Abbas chose the ‘Hello World’ of frameworks, The Blog Tutorial. The tutorial started with creation of database and tables needed for it. Here, Cake’s Convention over Configuration was discussed in detail. Abbas explained how naming of database table names and columns can make wonders to your application and then proved it by showing the real working example.

Workshop then progressed with creation of models, controllers and views to add/edit/index the blog posts. Abbas along with Amit Badkas were giving their valuable inputs wherever needed while coding for the above functionality. The basic CRUD functionality was completed in nearly one and half hours and with just under 30 lines of code in the controller. Everyone present at the workshop was impressed with the time required and the amount of code that has to be written to make the whole functionality work.

After the workshop was over, as expected, there was lots of questions regarding components, helpers and various other things which generally everyone writes on their own. The magic of CakePHP had worked and everyone was thinking about most of the things getting done automagically for them. Thankfully, Cake had answers for every question that was thrown to us and we were able to satisfy everyone.

Finally, there were some concerns raised about the security and speed of CakePHP framework but then it is up-to the developer to use the framework wisely, keep profiling the code, using caching wherever possible. Using all these things together can ensure the best end result which will make everyone happy.

As always, we discussed about the next meetup which will be on Saturday, January 9, 2010. It was decided that all the future presentations should be more technical where someone won’t just talk about something but also show how to make use of it by writting actual code. And we are now waiting for Nagpurians to come forward and show their programming skills to everyone.

If you are interested in attending the meetup, drop me a mail with your contact details on aditya @ this domain. And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter for updates on meetup.