Perhaps a lot of your opinion is as a result of learning COBOL at college – I’m guessing you studied Computer Science or Engineering or somesuch thing – myself I went to art school studied sculpture and have drifted over the years into web development…

Its kind of hard to explain, but I reached a point as a developer when I felt the urge to go looking for some structure to use to underpin my code. I think the main motivating factor for programmers is boredom – or to put it the other way the desire to learn… I’ve developed CMS systems in ASP and PHP over and over again. The early ones were often rubbish – but the latter ones were really good. But I wanted to learn OO programming and in many ways the easiest way to do this is to imesre yourself in something that aleady exists.

I touched on all sorts of frameworks (including ROR) and felt I quite liked Cake – I’ve been working with on and off for about six months.

Some days I feel like I never want to use anything else and other days it makes me want to tear my hair out, however the import thing is that it makes you think about different ways of getting to the same result.

Some things are just plain wierd.
– if you make a framework why don’t you make it secure by default?
– why the total lack of a native HABTM checkbox solution?
– why isn’t there native support for extra fields in join tables? (I know there is in 1.2)

Other things really annoy me – I know in strict MVC sense that perhaps one shouldn’t have direct access to session variables in the Model – BUT doing things like appending a session id to a row is such a common action that it seems daft to write reams of code just so you can post it through the controller – the RIGHT way…

(This sounds like a total moan – so I should say I love using Cake and have a lot of respect for the guys who built and continue to build it)

I’ve been thinking a lot about Code Ignitor recently thinking that maybe that offers a good balance and also written my own CRUD classes for use in other projects. At the end of the day a framework should take care of the grunt work not tie you down.

Right now I have no idea what the answer is.