Craigslist and Google Maps Mashup Thingy: Day 5 – CakePHP
Today technically counts as day 5 of my Craigslist and Google Maps Mashup thing since I didn’t work on it at all yesterday due to getting Command and Conquer 3: Kane Edition. I got the limited edition number 73137, which is cool since it’s a palindrome!
Anyway, today I actually did work a little bit on the mashup. I spent most of my time switching out from a random php output file to a CakePHP setup. I haven’t ever used CakePHP before, but I have used Ruby on Rails quite a bit. CakePHP is sort of like PHP’s answer to rails. It copies a lot of the ideas and conventions that Ruby on Rails expects developers to follow.
Because of the similarities between CakePHP and Rails, I found it pretty simple to migrate the PHP I already had to CakePHP. I just had to learn the proper syntax to get everything working in Cake. I still think Ruby is a really beautifully simple language to write code in. Cake tries to get things looking Ruby-ish, but there’s still some weirdness involved. It’s good for me to be learning these PHP things anyway, though. I’ve put PHP on the backburner for too long.
Tomorrow, if I have time to work on the project, I think I’ll implement the actual UI side of things. I have a rough idea of how I want users to be able to interact with the site. Hopefully designing the interface will be as easy as it is in Rails.