Yesterday I found a tool which could be handy for rookie CakePHP developers. Atlas is a web code generator based in CakePHP. As a glance it’s a web alternative of CakePHP bake console which is a nice idea indeed.
My first impression was that tool is like diamond in the mud and I was wondering how I didn’t hear about this tool till now, but after installing I realized that it’s not so good as it looked like.
Why?
The first problem occurs in the generation of my first project – I’ve got a error message in Spanish which I couldn’t understand. I had to use Google translate for it, but after the translation, the message still doesn’t say much – “Failed to generate project skeleton”.
After debugging the code figuring out why this error means, I found that the application uses backslash as directory separator (\) ?!? and of course this lead to directories and files with strange names like /var/www/ctest\app\controllers directories where ctest\app\controllers was the full name of the directory 
. I am on Ubuntu Desktop machine where backslash is not a directory separator.
Pros and Cons about this tool:
Pros:
- Very nice interface – really big point for Atlas
- It should work properly on windows environment and based on the features list and screenshots it quite intuitive.
- I like web based development everything is in your web browser, so another big plus.
Cons
- Not working as expected – the backslash problem described above
- If you are not Spanish speaking person – you are in the middle of nowhere when you see error like this: Error: no se ha podido generar el esqueleto del proyecto
- No documentation at all. I had to look in the code in order to get idea why I cannot create a project – Not clear labels (or at least no hints). Probably a hint like: Directory (enter a full path to the empty directory under htdocs) or similar could help a lot.
The conclusion:
Atlas looking like promising tool, still it’s far from the final version, but it’s worth to try it in Windows environment. I definitely will follow that project in the future, so hopefully I could use it one day
Loading ...
I have seen this project a while ago, but as it is, like you mentioned, partially in Spanish, I didn’t bother to try it. An alternative for web-based development with CakePHP is cakeapp, though I guess you already know about it
Thanks Daniel,
I didn’t knew about CakeApp, but I don’t like the idea of having exposed all database structure in public (or at least I have such feeling when I browse the application). Otherwise it’s true – not bad as concept and it could help newbies to get started even without any knowledge of Cake
Agreed, for serious projects it is not that cool to have the database structure exposed…