CakePHP is an open source web application framework written in PHP, but its model is designed in Ruby on Rails. As the Rails of the PHP world, CakePHP has adopted many excellent features of RoR and is highly mature. You can see a list of websites currently using the CakePHP framework on the Sites in the wild page of the cakephp.org site.
The new highlight of CakePHP 2.0 is its support for PHP 5 features, including PHP 5 exceptions, standard library, JSON encoding (json_encode) and the newly introduced PDO (PHP Data Objects) data access interface. The PSR-0 naming convention has been adopted and all classes can be mapped to a file with the same class name. Objects are now injectable as CakePHP libraries, and as the developers put it "there is no excuse to modify core files anymore". The development team also stated that due to the extensive use of lazy-loading, CakePHP is now much faster than before, even in debug mode.
CakePHP's underlying control library has been completely rebuilt, adding functions such as automatic help generation, parameter checking, and code highlighting. Moreover, PHPUnit is used to replace SimpleUnit as the testing framework in CakePHP, and the support functions for PostgreSQL, SQLite and Microsoft's SQL Server database are also improved. New CakePHP 2.0 documentation has been written, along with a detailed migration guide for CakePHP 1.3 users.
CakePHP 2.0 no longer supports PHP4, and the CakePHP team has refactored its code base to strictly follow the PHP 5 specification (including 5.2 and later versions).
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