Overview

CakePHP is free, open source and radid development framework for PHP. It is a foundational structure for programmers to create web applications. Our primary goal is to enable you to work in a structured and rapid affection–without loss of flexibility.

The CakePHP framework provides a robust base application. It can handle every aspect, from the user’s initial request all the way to the final rendering of a web page. And since the framework follows the principles of MVC, it allows you to easily customize and extend most aspects of your application.

MVC- Software design pattern

Model: The Model represents the application data

View: The View renders a presentation of model data

Controller: The Controller handles and routes requests made by the client. The controller also uses models to gain access to the application’s data. Models normally represent database tables, but they could also represent LDAP entries, RSS feeds, or files on the system.

Once the controller has worked its magic on the data, it hands it to a view. Vview takes this data and gets it ready for presentation to the client. Views in CakePHP are usually in HTML format, but a view could just as easily be a PDF, XML document, or JSON object depending on your needs.

Dispature: The dispatcher checks the request URL (/cakes/buy), and hands the request to the correct controller.

CakePHP Request Cycle

Now that you are familiar with the different layers in CakePHP, let’s review how a request cycle works in CakePHP:

The typical CakePHP request cycle starts with a user requesting a page or resource in your application. At a top level each request goes through the following steps:

1. The web server rewrite rules direct the request to webroot/index.php.
2. Your Application is loaded and bound to anHttpServer.
3. Your application’s middleware is initialized.
4. A request and response are dispatched through the PSR-7 Middleware that your application uses. Typically this includes error trapping and routing.
5. If no response is returned from the middleware and the request contains routing information, a controller & action are selected.
6. The controller’s action is called and the controller interacts with the required Models and Components.
7. The controller delegates response creation to the View to generate the output resulting from the model data.
8. The view uses Helpers and Cells to generate the response body and headers.
9. The response is sent back out through theMiddleware.

The HttpServer emits the response to the web server.

CakePHP Naming Conventions

1. Controller Conventions: Controller class names are plural, CamelCased and end in Controller.

Ex. UsersController, ArticlesController

2. Model and DataBase Conventions: Table class names are plural, CamelCased and end in Table.

Ex. UsersTable, ArticlesTable

3. View Conventions: View template files are named after the controller functions they display, in an underscored form. TheviewAll() function of the ArticlesController class will look for a view template in src/Template/Articles/view_all.ctp.

Features

1. Zero configuration
   No configuration is needed when you install CakePHP and this makes is so easy to get started.
2. CRUD Scaffolding
   CakePHP is certainly the most pursued web framework because of the high-end scaffolding features user can easily create, retrieve, update and delete objects that are related to each other.
3. Extendable
   CakePHP is easily extendable with Components, Helpers, Behaviors, and Plug-ins. This allows CakePHP programmer to create parts of reusable codes that can keep them from writing everything from scratch every time.

4. Security
   there are many other things that affect the overall performance of an application but without proper security measures taken, everything else becomes too immaterial. CakePHP understands that very well and comes with built-in tools to address security and authorization needs with Input validation, SQL injection prevention, XSS prevention and other similar features.

5. Built-in validation

6. Easily use Third Party API

It is one of the best features we can easily Integrate third party library in CakePHP Framework.

7. Compatibilities with PHP version 4,5,7

8. Flexible ACL (Access Control List)

9. Data Sanitization

The CakePHP Sanitize class can be used to rid user-submitted data of malicious data and other unnecessary information. Sanitize is a core library, so it can be used anywhere inside of your coding but is probably best used in controllers or models.

Dnyaneshwar Jadhav

Dnyaneshwar - Well Experienced Professional in Web Development. Expertise in CakePHP | Laravel | Magento | Javascript | Ajax | JQuery | Holding an excellent experience of 4 years.