nuts and bolts of cakephp

You lucky Mac users…

Posted in CakePHP by teknoid on October 17, 2008

I came across this really awesome looking product today, called ModelBaker.
It is a nice GUI environment (and then some), which allows one to easily and intuitively build web apps on top of the CakePHP platform. I only had a chance to look at the screen casts so far, but from the initial looks it certainly looks very impressive.

Now, I just wish we had something similar for other OS’s… or, perhaps, better yet a web-based tool, which would allow one to build excellent apps right in the browser.

At any rate, just wanted to spread the word and share this goody with everyone. Now, I’ve got some serious thinking to do about the potential of such a tool :)

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  1. NOSLOW said, on October 18, 2008 at 5:41 pm

    Holy crap, that looks too good to be true! If it really does all that the screens implies in a decent fashion, I’ll be able to convince my boss to buy me a MacBook Pro. I’ll be keeping my eye on this one.

    BTW, Great blog! ;)

    Reply
  2. teknoid said, on October 18, 2008 at 6:17 pm

    @NOSLOW

    Thanks, if/when you do try it out let me know how it goes ;)

    Reply
  3. Simon said, on October 19, 2008 at 6:03 pm

    Since some weeks I’m working on a web-based solution to build cake applications online: http://cakeapp.com.

    Reply
  4. teknoid said, on October 19, 2008 at 10:00 pm

    @Simon

    Thanks for sharing. It would be nice to hear about your progress…

    Reply
  5. Jubarr said, on October 20, 2008 at 2:46 am

    Impressive as hell, it is like bake to the second power

    Reply
  6. Simon said, on October 20, 2008 at 7:46 am

    Progress: I added a screencast: http://cakeapp.com/pages/screencast/ ;)

    Reply
  7. teknoid said, on October 20, 2008 at 10:06 am

    @Jubarr

    Yeah, very nice :)

    @Simon

    Thanks. Looks interesting. Hopefully you’ll add the ability to work with models as well as tables and provide features to add validation and model associations, etc.

    Reply
  8. Brendon Kozlowski said, on October 20, 2008 at 1:41 pm

    @teknoid – there was a (couple) discussion(s) on this in the google groups. In one of them, I did mention that using an Adobe Air solution could provide a single, unified means of creating a cross-OS compatible solution, without much of an overhead for prerequisites (Adobe Air is a pretty minimal install, even compared to Sun’s Java Runtime Environment).

    Considering Adobe Air is marketed towards the web developer, it almost seems like a natural fit. :)

    Reply
  9. teknoid said, on October 20, 2008 at 2:08 pm

    @Brendon Kozlowski

    Would AIR also allow you to deploy the same UI in web browser? I feel like having something like this http://heroku.com/ would be awesome. That being said, if AIR also allows an easy deployment to desktop, it would be even better.

    Reply
  10. Brightstorm said, on October 21, 2008 at 12:35 pm

    Ive been on the beta program for modelbaker for the last couple of weeks and its seriously impressive stuff. Apart from having to set up you host and make a database you can do everything else through the interface. You can then save your config as a template that you can use for new projects. Well worth a look. Email the address on the modelbaker site if you want to get in on the beta program

    Reply
  11. teknoid said, on October 21, 2008 at 1:31 pm

    @Brightstorm

    Thank you for your comment. I’d love to jump into beta, but do not have a Mac easily available :(
    (But I’ll certainly keep an eye out on it)

    Reply
  12. Picant tecles said, on October 21, 2008 at 4:50 pm

    PFC vs ModelBaker…

    A través d’un dels meus feeds de CakePHP he descobert una aplicació semblant a l’aplicació que vull pel meu projecte anomenada ModelBaker, que pinta molt bé tot i ser només per Mac….

    Reply
  13. Paul said, on October 22, 2008 at 11:24 am

    I tried the cakeapp.com Site and it’s great!
    Only missing one feature: Download baked sources ;)

    Reply
  14. Simon said, on October 22, 2008 at 11:42 am

    @teknoid: you can make model associations with the SQL Designer: Just create the tables (= models) with the cake conventions for foreign keys. Cakeapp.com will build the associations as you would type “cake bake modelname all”.

    For example: http://cakeapp.com/sqldesigners/sql/cities
    Result: http://cities.cakeapp.com/cities/add

    Reply
  15. teknoid said, on October 22, 2008 at 12:01 pm

    @Paul

    Yep, certainly is has great potential.

    @Simon

    Sure, but what I meant is the ability to easily say Post HABTM Tag, then the app establishes the correct tables (following cake conventions), you would also be able to add validation… the idea is to make it similar to the way ModelBaker works, since it’s so easy even for someone with very little experience. Of course, I also see the power of being able to work directly on the tables… just food for thought, I guess :)

    Reply
  16. Brendon Kozlowski said, on October 23, 2008 at 11:22 am

    @teknoid: Sorry I didn’t come back to see your question to my comment earlier.

    Actually, now that I think about it a bit more, I don’t think Adobe Air would work without a server. It would need to interact with PHP some how, and I don’t believe Air (itself) supports PHP; only HTML, JavaScript, and Flash/Flex (and XML is in there somewhere).

    If Heroku is acting as a central repository (and API), then it may be possible (with PHPSWF/Flex communication, otherwise a different solution would be necessary.

    The issue is getting PHP to run in a packaged environment…which I didn’t think of until just now. I’d be curious to know how ModelBaker solved this (if they take advantage of the fact that all OSX installs have PHP pre-installed or not, for instance).

    Reply
  17. teknoid said, on October 23, 2008 at 12:09 pm

    @Brendon Kozlowski

    Thank you for the explanation.

    Reply
  18. Brett Wilton said, on October 30, 2008 at 6:38 pm

    Thanks for the post, very interesting not that I have a mac. Would be great if there was a VM to run the mac OSX on my win or debian box(last time I looked there wasn’t).

    Reply
  19. Brendon Kozlowski said, on March 30, 2009 at 10:17 am

    I thought you might be interested in the following tool and announcement, teknoid:

    http://flexandair.com/?p=37

    It would still require a central location that could run and return values (since OSX is the only OS that comes packaged by default with PHP), but I think that’s what you wanted anyway, something like Heroku. :) So…this, along with a jacked up version of cakeapp would go a long way towards this possibility.

    Reply
  20. teknoid said, on March 30, 2009 at 10:59 am

    @Brendon Kozlowski

    Thanks for sharing. Definitely looks interesting, I’ll be keeping an eye out on this one.

    Reply
  21. Simon Brüchner said, on August 25, 2009 at 9:04 am

    Hi again,
    I added a lots of features to the http://cakeapp.com site. It does now CakePHP SQL validation, it shows up all models/controllers on the homepage of an created app, protection of application by password.
    Simon

    Reply
  22. Sarwar Faruque said, on August 26, 2009 at 4:45 am

    @Simon Thanks for pointing to your webapp http://cakeapp.com

    Reply

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