Turns out there are several folks working on rails-like functionality for PHP. I've looked at them. Sort of leaning towards 'cakePHP'. Only because it's got four or five people using it. The others have one or two. It isn't as many folks as are using ruby||rails by far. The advantage is - code re-use. I mentioned that programmers are lazy. We don't like to do the same things over and over. Re-writing what we've done in another language is even worse than re-writing it because just like human languages, something always gets lost in translation.

Anyway, back to cake for a minute. For programming web apps on top of a database, there's no turning back to the old days. This is so much faster. It's well organized. And if you don't like how it's organized you can change it. Name your project and create a schema. You have to do these things anyway. But with the new tools, this is all you have to do in order to provide basic functionality. It's called CRUD - create, read, update, delete - all from a web page. Once you name your project and define the schema, you've got CRUD. Can't think how many times I've re-written this part to deal with a changed schema. With the application architecture, you don't have to. It's already there. You've also got more. It's an application architecture. There are three layers, and they all have different code pages. One layer talks to the database and other physical resources. A middle layer contains what we call business logic. That's really the secret sauce for the application. The top layer is presentation. HTML, XML, text, whatever.

Unlike the old days, the secret sauce and database logic are removed from the file that gets changed the most - the presentation layer. We're always tweaking how a page looks. We tweak the way it works less often. We tweak the way it accesses data even less than that.