Diving Into CakePHP and Ruby on Rails

I love web development. It's the one kind of programming that seems to continually intrigue me and bring me back for more. I developed my first site using PHP (essentially on the WAMP stack) about 8 or 9 years ago, and haven't looked back. It wasn't until recently that I started looking into frameworks and libraries such as jQuery, Prototype, etc. I always preferred doing things with a text editor from scratch. Sure, it took longer, but I new the complete ins and outs of all of my website. Well, now that time is becoming more and more of a luxury, I can't afford to build sites from scratch anymore. Hence the discovery of two great frameworks: Ruby on Rails and CakePHP.

First, if you don't have any exposure to either of these technologies, there are some similarities in their paradigms. Both are designed to save you, the developer, time in building websites. Their goal is to do the monotonous, repetitive, underlying work for you so you can move on to build the rest of the website quickly. both use principles of MVC (Model View Controller) development. Essentially, their design forces you to use good design principles in your website. A very basic, and incomplete, description of the MVC components could be the following:
A Model is the data and associated interactions (Objects and Database)
A View is the presentation of that data (HTML, CSS)
A Controller is the logic used (Ruby/PHP)
A more complete explanation can be found here.
Another great thing that both provide is the ability to use REST APIs. So, for example, if you were to collect data that you wanted to open up to third-party applications, you could provide them with an API to access it. To me, this is a must to allow for layers of abstraction I previously mentioned in another post.

Ruby on Rails, until very recently, was a mythical and powerful creature to me. I had heard great things about it, heard what it could do, but I had absolutely no experience with it. I decided to change that this week. Within minutes I had completed the download and install of all required software to be up and running (I already had XAMPP on my machine from other development projects). Two great tutorials for learning basic Ruby on Rails can be found here and here. I went through both of them and feel like I have a good understanding of the design principles and capabilities of the technology. Ruby is a very interesting language and pretty easy to pick up. Ruby on Rails seems to be picking up steam in the US as of late, and is being used by websites such as Twitter.

Now, at first I was thinking, why learn another language like Ruby? I already have a good grip on PHP, so why not just stick with that? Great question! (Yes, sometimes I answer my own questions.) That's why I first looked at using CakePHP (plus, my friend was interested in learning it as well). According to the creator of CakePHP, he liked the idea of Ruby on Rails and wanted to bring that to the world of PHP, so he basically took the idea. To quote him from here:
"While it's difficult to copy Rails in PHP, it's quite possible to write an equivalent system. I like the terseness of Ruby code, but I need the structure that Rails provides, how it makes me organize my code into something sustainable. That's why I'm ripping off Rails in Cake."
I followed along with the tutorials on the CakePHP website and had no problem setting this environment up either. I just dropped it into my existing XAMPP setup and ran with it.

I also found plenty of "CakePHP vs. Ruby on Rails" type discussions. In the end, I surprisingly don't have much of a preference. Both were easy to set up, both were easy to learn the basics of, and both provide the framework principles I was looking for. I have a feeling that with more exposure I'll be able to choose a side more easily, but in the meantime, I'm just waiting around for a real project to try these out on. What about you? Which do you prefer?