What’s the release date of the stable version of CakePHP 1.2?
That’s an often asked question, and no, I don’t know the answer to this question. But I know the reasons why there is no release date for the stable version of CakePHP 1.2 announced.
One point is that CakePHP is a volunteer project, so it is almost impossible to predict what amount of work can be done during a certain time period, and hence it becomes difficult to say when it will be done. There are times with high activity (i.e. a lot of commits), but there are also times with almost no activity, see the time line of trac to see that “pattern”.
Setting a release date also leads to expectations. People expect that you deliver on that date. If you cannot deliver, people start complaining. And if that happens too often, the project gets the image of being unreliable.
So we have to wait until it’s done :)
The problem is that people (like myself) now want to know what to start a new project with - 1.1 or 1.2. I have a project I intend to release in 3-6 months. I want to use 1.2, but I want to use a version of Cake that will be stable. What to do? Woe is me.
Our application has been in development for months, hopefully being released in about a month. For at least the last 6 months we’ve been using the 1.2 SVN, and I can say that even updating to the latest nightlies we’ve had very little issue with stability of the core.
So while I had originally anticipated that 1.2 would be released by the time we shipped, I am not worried that this probably won’t be the case. As long as the unit tests all pass - and you are using tests, right?
Speaking of which. Daniel, with the release of 1.2.0.5137alpha are you planning on updating your test suite to use Console Shells? I have stuck with r4981 for the moment to keep using the suite.
Well I’d have to say that after using 1.2 there’s going to be a dump in the road for those who upgrade from 1.1! Lots of new functionality, as well as, a lot of depreciated stuff, i.e. form helper, validation …
I personally don’t like how error messages are displayed underneath form fields in 1.2 :( But that’s just me.
@airrob: As Grant Cox already mentioned, if you use tests, it doesn’t matter that much whether you use 1.1 or 1.2 if your focus is stability. You simply have to be aware that there is not documentation available yet for 1.2 and that you have to dig in the code sometimes to figure out how to use a method.
@Grant: Yes, I will migrate the test suite to a shell script, even though I don’t know yet how to do it, as the new console doesn’t support the alias mechanism used by bake2.
@Manny: I think most features of 1.1 will still work in 1.2.
Afaik you can change the position where the error messages are displayed with the help of CSS.
I think any new personal / open source project should now use 1.2. For commercial projects it is a tough call :(
@Manny you can over ride errors appearing below fields but you have to write much more code. I guess it was a presumption that most people, including myself, like it that way. My personal reasons for liking error messages below form field are that if the form is long the error are still in context…
So hang on, let me get this straight: you are working on this project, a lot of other people are working on it as well, and no one has any idea of how long it will take, after months during which this whole “Cake-1.2-will-be-ready-soon” stuff has being going on and on?!
Part of being successful is being able to know your skills, and your way to organize your time to devote to a particular project. And it definitely doesn’t sound too promising…
Anyhow, best of luck.
@Fabio - Would you feel better if the current alpha builds were labeled 1.2.0.x?
I’m am very pleased with all the functionality going into Cake. I always keep an eye on Trac. For the past 2 months i’ve been working on an application, using 1.2 from SVN, and my application never ‘exploded’ even though i update cake very often.
Keep up the good work.. It can stay in alpha forever as long as progress is constant :D
@Tarique: I agree with you that new personal / open source projects should use 1.2, but I also think it may be easier to start with 1.1 for newbie users.
@Fabio: Well, for me it is important to know that every 30-45 days a new version is released, but it doesn’t matter how it is labeled.
@gribelu: I agree with you.
[...] Cake aims to be a leaner framework with emphasis on quick development and a minimum of configuration. Basically, you start light and start putting things in. Documentation is decent, it runs on PHP 4, but I’m worried about the release cycle. A lot of basic features you need, like internationalization, are upcoming in release 1.2, which is still alpha. I’ve been following the roadmap and there were still plenty of active tickets. There just isn’t any fixed date for the stable 1.2 release. [...]
If Cake aims to the a leaner framework then why is it consistently getting more and more memory usage with each new version
I am working on a fairly simple app (12 models and related controllers).
I have a requirement to have this app run inside another CMS. That CMS uses between 2 and 5 M of memory for various parts of the CMS. This leaves me a minimum of 3M of memory and an average of 4M using the default PHP 8M memory limit in PHP4 (the environment I will be releasing in)
I have started to build this app in Cake 1.2.0.5427 (released July 9 2007)
When I go to my login page, which is a controller that uses no models and should therefor me pretty lean it has a memory usage of 2.7M. Not too bad but not great either considering all this is doing is loading a controller which then loads a view and displays it in a layout.
However what is worse is that most of my views being displayed are using 4.6M of memory on average. This means I will not be able to get within the 8M memory limit.
Even changing the view to not use the Forms helper and instead hardcoding all form elements only results in 200k less memory used.
So I decided to download the lastest version of the 1.2 branch from SVN and to my chargrin the average memory usage is now up to 5.0M and increase of several hundred K
So for kicks I decided to do some quick hacks to my code and test my login page (that used 2.7M) in Cake 1.1
It was done to 1.7M which is much better.
This means that I can assume at least .5M if not 1M less memory if I go back to using Cake 1.1, which I may have to do in the next phase.
I am liking the work I am doing with Cake (also having used CodeIgniter in the past) but if Cake is aiming to be leaner and faster as they go forward then they need to do some rethinking in their memory management.
The one thing I would like to see in Cake is a bit more conditional loading of things, so that if I dont want or need it I dont have to have it loaded.
Yes this would mean having to explicitly load some things, but have built a fairly big project in CodeIgniter I found that very handy, and since my CodeIgniter project is 2 or 3 times bigger in scope than the current Cake one, you would assume it used more memory, but it uses less, because more things are conditionally loaded.
Didnt want to get this to be a CI Cake comparison, merely trying point out that I think Cake needs to look at the amount of memory it is using.
@tonanbarbarian: Thanks for your comment! Interesting to read for someone like me who had never to deal with such constraints yet.
You may want to open some enhancement tickets for the conditional loading of things.