When comparing CakePHP vs Leaf, the Slant community recommends CakePHP for most people. In the question“What are the best PHP frameworks?” CakePHP is ranked 11th while Leaf is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose CakePHP is:
Cake has a built-in ORM which is pretty easy to use and learn. Building queries can also be done very easily and fetching entire columns can be done in one or two lines of code.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Built-in ORM that's easy to use
Cake has a built-in ORM which is pretty easy to use and learn. Building queries can also be done very easily and fetching entire columns can be done in one or two lines of code.
Pro Fast development
Developing in CakePHP is very fast and flexible.
CakePHP is about fast and reliable development, it achieves this by following the convention over configuration principle as it's heavily inspired by Rails (which follows the same programming paradigm).
Convention over configuration is all about making it easier for the developer to start immediately writing code without worrying on what's going on "under the hood".
Pro Large library of helper classes
CakePHP has a large library of helper classes with features such as:
- Authorization
- AJAX
- Forms
- E-mails
- Internationalization
etc...
Pro Exhaustive list of resources to learn CakePHP
Cake's great community has thrown together an exhaustive and amazing list of resources to get started with CakePHP. It's open source and can be found on GitHub.
Pro Open Source
CakePHP open source and is licensed under the MIT license.
Pro Simple structure
Leaf has a simple structure and easy code.
Pro Useful classes
Contains classes for managing requests, responses, cookies, logging, views, HTTP caching, and more.
Pro Beautiful, well organised documentation
Pro REST-based
Cons
Con Slow
Because of legacy code, old concepts and prioritizing development speed over everything else, CakePHP is bloated and slow.
Con Lack of a database layer
Has inbuilt connection methods for only mysqli and pdo.