milesjohnson

By now most of you have heard that the awesome Nate Abele (which I had the privilege of talking to and partying with at Zendcon) is leaving the CakePHP team. A lot of developers were taken back by this and are unsure if they should continue to develop with CakePHP. Now, I find this ludicrous on many levels. Sure Nate was the lead developer, but that doesn't mean he was the only one. We still have the mighty Mark Story and the returning Larry Masters.

I had the opportunity to attend Nate's "Future of CakePHP" panel at Zendcon in which he talked about many of the problems facing current frameworks. Towards the end of the panel he showed off the new Cake 3 functionality using filters and closures, which I have to say, is pretty clever and badass. Now if you haven't figured out by now, the new Lithium project is a fork of the Cake 3 branch, so basically Lithium is a new 5.3 specific framework, which I am fully looking forward to fiddling with. Others have already figured this out, and we should expect it sometime this Monday, according to Nate.

Now where does this leave the future of CakePHP? It will stay the same. I know for once thing, ill continue to develop and pump out scripts because I see no reason in stopping. Additionally, if Lithium is anywhere near the same setup, I can easily port my current component, behaviors, etc to the Lithium architecture. I don't see CakePHP dieing anytime soon, simply because Lithium is an experimental 5.3 framework, and 5.3 wont take off as fast anytime soon. However it should be fun to mess with :]

I wish Nate Abele and the CakePHP team good luck with their new endeavors, I will thorougly be looking forward to both projects.