PHP on Trax follow-up
Last month I mentioned a PHP framework based on David Heinemeier Hansson’s Ruby on Rails, called PHP on Trax.
At the time, it was quite early in development and not really ready for use, but I’ve kept a casual eye on it since as it could turn out to be very handy. It turns out I was keeping a particularly casual eye on it, as I failed to notice the site change to a more RoR-style layout and the publishing of a very basic demo app in the mould of RoR out-of-the-box apps.
It’s obviously still under development and I haven’t delved too far back into it yet, but it’s nice to see a bit of progress and as ‘PHP on Trax’ is the most popular search term for people finding this blog, I thought I’d do an update on it. Maybe I’ll check back in another month and find it’s taken over the world 
May 4th, 2006 at 1:58 am
How is it different/better than CakePHP ( http://www.cakephp.org )?
May 4th, 2006 at 9:12 am
Hi Greg, I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you whether it is or not as I haven’t tried CakePHP.
The main appeal of PHP on Trax is that it’s a PHP replica of Ruby on Rails. For those of us who don’t have the time or inclination to learn Ruby just to use Rails, PHP on Trax steps in. I’ve since actually gotten ’round to using Ruby on Rails proper and I have to say RoR is great. It hasn’t replaced PHP for me yet, but I can see it doing so.
If you’re already happy with a framework such as Cake that you use for PHP then you may not really want/need PHP on Trax. If you want to see what Ruby on Rails is all about without learning Ruby, then check out PHP on Trax.
If you want to go the whole hog and get the ‘applications in 15 minutes’ bug, check out the real thing - Ruby on Rails. I wrote a very usable forum system in 3 casual days as my first test of RoR. I would have spent a lot longer in PHP building up the background stuff first.