Question

I’ve used CakePHP on several projects in the past, and have more recently started using Ruby on Rails, but there’s a new project I’m about to start that will require PHP. While refreshing myself on CakePHP I learned that there is a new framework called Lithium that is essentially what CakePHP 3 was going to be. It’s being developed by a group of former core CakePHP devs.

I haven’t found a whole lot of information about it since it’s still under development status, but I was wondering if anyone knows (or has a link to) some information on what benefits it provides over CakePHP. Hopefully something a bit beyond the quick overview shown on the official site. I’m trying to decide whether to use CakePHP for my upcoming PHP project or to wait a bit for Lithium to release a non-development version and try that out.

Answer 1

Hope this answer doesn’t come too late, (and as the lead developer of Lithium, I’m a little biased :-)), but I will say that this is a hard thing to sum up. Lithium is the culmination of over 4 years’ experience building and working with CakePHP, and while it retains many of the same designs and conventions, it was built to correct CakePHP’s many architectural flaws.

In brief:

• Framework features are grouped into loosely-coupled “packages” that are easy to use independently.
• Tangentially, everything in Lithium is a “library”, including your application, and Lithium itself. Support for integrating 3rd-party libraries is vastly improved, and all classes are namespaced, so you can finally have a model called File.
• It is very easy to swap out core classes with your own custom implementations.
• Lithium has a unique “filter” system that allows you to hook into many methods in the framework, which allows you to design your applications in an aspect-oriented fashion. These features work together to make Lithium the most flexible PHP framework, bar none.
• Everything is lazy-loaded, and the architecture has been designed for maximum performance.
• Lithium supports the latest tech, especially new databases like CouchDB and MongoDB.

I could go on for a while, but that’s the gist of it. If you have any more questions, feel free to drop by #li3 on Freenode, and someone will happily give you a tour.