Today there are many frameworks available for the PHP programming language, and especially a lot of RAD (Rapid Application Development) frameworks which aim to make web development faster, less tedious and more organized. New and new frameworks are being released daily.

Following are the different frameworks which are hot in industry today :
Zend Framework, CakePHP, Symfony,
Seagull Framework, WACT, Prado,
PHP on TRAX, ZooP Framework,
CodeIgniter and many more……

Among these CakePHP was one of the first frameworks to port the RAD philosophy - which became so popular after Ruby on Rails.

CakePHP :
CakePHP v1.0 is now one of the most popular and intuitive solutions for PHP programming. It is a rapid development framework for PHP which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association Data Mapping, Front Controller and MVC. It provides a structured framework that enables PHP users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications, without any loss to flexibility.

CakePHP separates itself from the rest of the PHP world by concentrating on simplicity, portability, flexibility and scalability. CakePHP does not require any additional libraries like PEAR or Propel. CakePHP includes an architecture that allows for easily extending its many built-in features through components and helpers.
CakePHP supports natively various commonly used databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite, and uses a wrapper for database abstraction layers like AdoDb or PEAR::MDB.

Why to use CakePHP :

* Lightweight : It is one of the smallest frameworks available: less than 300KB in a .zip archive.
* CakePHP does not believe in a components/widget approach, and does not include pre-made modules to manage some common but relatively specialistic tasks (reading a RSS feed, sending email messages).
* Compatible with PHP4 and PHP5 : CakePHP applications can be run both on PHP4 and PHP5.
* Enhanced AJAX support : Cake’s pre-defined AJAX helper makes the creation of Web 2.0 AJAX interfaces extremely fast and easy.
* Suitable for any kind of project : CakePHP is an excellent choice to create almost any kind of web application, from the small personal website to the complex e-commerce solution.
* Bake : useful “bake” command line script to generate parts of the code automatically.Bake utility, is currently available as either a batch file or a PHP script.