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 🙂