I am working on a project in CakePHP...the first time I have used it. I am finding it very well made, but I am not exactly in the right frame of mind for some of its limitations.
As a SQL guy, I am used to being able to design whatever queries I want and get whatever info I need whenever I need it. The query engine built into CakePHP is decent, but kind of breaks down on more complex queries such as those relating multiple levels of a model. Specifically, it is not happy starting at a parent and joining with a child or grandchild.
This means that if I have relationships such as REGION has many CITIES has many STORES has many PRODUCTS, I cannot simply add a paged query of all products to this REGION or CITY view. The two mechanisms for doing this--the containable query and the recursive query--break down at these levels. And if PRODUCTS is also a child of PACKAGE_TYPE, it is not really doable.
This doesn't kill the project...it just requires a little cake-like thinking. Instead of trying to show a fully paged PRODUCT report on my REGION view, I can just show a limited number of products, and provide a link to a view on the PRODUCT level that includes a filter on my region. The query needed at the region level can be coded into and called from the PRODUCT model as a "list the first 20" type of report instead of a "give me everything in multiple pages" type of report.
Without any code samples, this may not be easy to follow...and I am not putting any code samples together now. I guess the point is that Cake is good at providing reports at a child level that include parent level items, but is not so good at providing reports at a parent level that include the child levels. Just remember that and you won't run into the brick walls I did.
All that said, Cake makes it incredibly easy to put together a CRUD-based application, and I am happy to work within its strictures in exchange for fast creation of projects that can be hosted on nearly any local system or cheap internet provider you can name.
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