That sums up my experience with cakePHP too. I don't know what's happened with this framework in the last couple of years, but when I was first learning Rails and enjoying it, I used cakePHP for a big project because I knew PHP well, and didn't yet feel comfortable with committing to using Rails for it.

That was a decision I regretted many times. The hoops I had to jump through to deal with complex database queries were ridiculous. The difference in quality and robustness between ActiveRecord and cakePHP's ORM (at that time, anyway) were pronounced, with AR coming out way, way ahead.

There's no doubt, in my mind, that if you are going to take on a large, ambitious web application project, you'll be better served by Rails.

Yes, CakePHP's "ORM" isn't a real ORM - it was built when Objects were awesomely broken in PHP4 - but I've actually found it much more usable than the current state of Ruby's ActiveRecord/Datamapper. Manipulating arrays to get just the SQL you want is sometimes annoying, but for the queries that you honestly can't get out of the ORM in CakePHP, it's also likely you wouldn't be able to do the same in any other ORM.

You'll also have to note that both frameworks have progressed significantly in the last few years - CakePHP actually just released a new major version, as did Rails a few months ago - so your experience a few years ago - was this in the 1.1 era - would just be indicative of the framework's beginnings, not where it currently is.

Feel free to message me with your thoughts if they still conflict; I'd love to hear the other side of the story since improving CakePHP as a framework helps not just my ego, but other developers who are using CakePHP to make a living :)

Two things:

- In my very humble opinion, only one - English! I can't comment on the international community - book has been any good (That by Mariano Iglesias) and they all tend to either have outdated information or just bad code samples. So no, they do not surpass the quality of the framework. - Hard stuff is always hard, regardless of the framework. At a certain point, you start butting heads with limitations in the language, at which point no framework will help. I've also found "hard stuff" to be fairly easy in CakePHP due to the large plugin base I can reach into - only Django and Ruby Gems really solve this sort of problem - so no, the hard stuff doesn't get harder.

Regardless, I'd be more than happy to get your feedback on this though. Send me a message :)