CakePHP

What do you like best?

The best thing about Cake is the documentation. It is very concise and clear. The ease of starting off with building an application is relatively minimal compared to other PHP frameworks like Laravel.

What do you dislike?

The more recent versions of Cake have been a bit slow in terms of ORM and general request handling. Cake 2.x to Cake 3.x was a major revamp but they failed to make the migration process more automated and smoother.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

There are way better and more performant languages out there if you are building a web application. In case you have made up your mind that you are going to go with PHP, then CakePHP is a good option that could solve most of your use cases while being easy to start off.

If you are trying to build a REST back-end, Cake can be used and an intermediate layer can be setup to read and respond in JSON API or any other standard response formats. If you are considering to build a single page application using MVC, please evaluate the performance of your business case with Cake's templating framework as it could be a bit slower than other frameworks some times.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Our business case is a relatively simple one where we use Cake's ORM to its fullest. The ease of using this ORM has decreased development efforts in terms of writing optimised queries. Although, Cake is MVC, we have implemented an intermediate layer to make use of JSON API and send responses back in a standard JSON format.