Like its predecessor, this is another rant about the (end of the) CakePHP framework. Not that I particularly enjoy writing about the misfortune of others, but after reading this official announcement I felt compelled to post.
It has been two years since my last post on this subject and yes, the cake is still rising, but at what price? Will it still taste sweet now that two of its main ingredients are not part of it anymore? As Daniel puts it, probably the best thing to do now is to drink tea and to wait until the dust settles…
As far as I'm concerned, what really matters is that Garrett Woodworth (former CakePHP Project Manager) and Nate Abele (former CakePHP Lead Developer) are gone. They realized they had enough Nuts over the years and they decided to switch to a more Lithium-rich diet. More helthy and depression-proof, too!
Stupid metaphors and painful jokes aside, this is probably the best piece of news the CakePHP community received in a long time: the birth of a fork of the CakePHP framework, more precisely of the so-called Cake3 branch.
Cake3? I didn't keep up-to-date with the buzz, so I didn't know anything about this until today, when I decided to finally start catching up.
“Cake 3.0, on the other hand, is pretty different from the existing core code in a few notable ways. Mainly, it's been re-written from the ground up for PHP 5.3.”
from Cake 3 interview with Nate Abele, debuggable.com
Of course, in these three years of my full immersion in the Ruby language, I almost completely forgot about PHP too. PHP 5.3 means namespace and closures, i.e. the Rubyist's daily bread. A more modular CakePHP, properly object-oriented, with an ActiveRecord-like API for models (finally!) is definitely worth a look, especially if it's Nut-free as well.
The new framework will be called Lithium (sounds more professional already), and it's due to launch next monday, here: http://li3.rad-dev.org/ (at the time of writing, this link is password-protected).
Personally, I am very excited about this new project. It should have happened three years ago, really, but there's no point in being greedy: the time has finally come. I would like to (pre-)thank Garrett and Nate for their (upcoming) amazing work, I'll definitely keep a closer eye on it.