Switching PHP Framework from CakePHP to Yii

After about a year of developing with CakePHP, I have decided to make the switch to Yii.  There are several reasons I decided to make this switch, but the biggest one was performance related.  Don't get me wrong, I think CakePHP is a great development framework.  There were enough things that I personally did not like about Cakephp to justify my switch to learning a new MVC framework.  Here are a few of the reasons I decided to make the switch:

1) Yii is PHP 5 only.

      I really like PHP 5.  While CakePHP supports PHP 5, it also has to support PHP 4, and thus does some things under the hood which hinders its performance a little in order to support legacy PHP code.

2) Yii supports composite primary keys.

      One problem I had with CakePHP was how it did not support composite primary keys.  While this wasn't a huge deal breaker for me in Cake, it was definitely annoying.  Instead, every table had to have a unique ID as the sole primary key and your "composite" keys basically just had to be maintained through your own code.  Not terrible, but still rather annoying.  One thing I really did not like was how CakePHP thought that a "Has One" relationship should work in a database.  Take the example of Apple has one Banana.  Every textbook will tell you that to be in a proper normalized state, the Apple table will contain a field called 'banana_id', which will contain the ID of the corresponding Banana row.  This ensures that the Apple field can only contain one banana reference.  This is easily verified since Apple.banana_id holds one and only one value at a time.  Straight out of the CakePHP hasOne relationship documentation, it clearly states quite the opposite.  Does this produce a hasOne relationship?  Well, when you access models via Cake's API then sure it will hand you back one row, but your database is not in a normalized form.  There's technically nothing stopping you from firing up PhpMyAdmin and adding a few rows with the same Banana.apple_id.  This also means that if you are not careful with your queries or the way you access your data in Cake, you may end up with data redundancy.  This is why putting your databases in a normalized form is so important. There are ways around this in Cake but they require quite a bit of extra work, which of course defeats the purpose of its advertised "magic" in the first place.

3) CakePHP is too slow for my needs.

      If you search google for "CakePHP" and "Slow," you'll see many, many posts from developers wondering why they're application is responding so slowly.  You'll also notice that there are no real good answers as well.  Is CakePHP really that slow?

The quick answer:  No actually, it isn't slow.

Let me explain myself.  CakePHP can be fast.  By default however, it is very, very slow.  When you develop your application you will need to keep caching and performance in mind, something that most developers new to PHP frameworks don't do.  The problem is that in order to develop a fast CakePHP application, you cannot use the majority of the magic that Cake provides.  For example, Cake's documentation and tutorials will lead you to use mod_rewrite for pretty URLs (using .htaccess) and $this->link() to create formatted html links quick and easily.  This creates a lot of easily maintainable functionality quickly, but your performance will suffer greatly down the road.  Even an application relying heavily on XCache and Memcached still needs lots of customized work tailored specifically to your application in order to speed it up.  While this will be true with an application developed in Yii as well, its default performance is significantly greater than Cake's.  So while people complaining that Cake is slow are not necessarily right, you will have to work hard to get it speedy.

This post isn't meant to bash Cake.  I really do like the framework.  As I have gotten more used to developing in the MVC architecture I realize that Cake provided a great learning experience for me and worked as a great stepping stone in creating an MVC application.  I think that Yii will be the next step forward for my project, and future posts in this blog will hilight my experiences using Yii.

Are you currently using CakePHP?  Did you end up switching to Yii, or another framework?  I'd love to hear your thoughts!