A friend of mine has been using CakePHP to solve some problems where he works lately, and has been asking me for some help here and there. I always love to help as much as I can, but lately I've found my advice when it comes to CakePHP to be less helpful than it was in the past.

This post is in reply to a comment on a previous article that I thought contained some good questions:

CakePHP uses the Model-View-Controller (MVC) concept as a framework to encapsulate the three basic layers of an application. Models, the component of the MVC framework that connect the application to the data, are especially good at describing relational databases. One of the questions that seems to come up alot on the CakePHP Group in one form or another, is what the practical difference is between the various relationship types (or associations) that CakePHP models can implement. I'll try to explain what's helped me keep them straight...

I've been using CakePHP 1.2.x for projects at work, where our primary database back-end is Microsoft SQL Server. Maybe I'm just missing something, but it seems to me that SQL Server outputs datetime values in an odd way (by odd, I mean not parsable by strtotime). When pulling datetime values out of SQL Server, CakePHP will render them as PHP strings just as they are returned from the server, in this format:

Jan 10 2008 12:25:07:000PM

Now, strtotime parses incoming values according to GNU Date Input Format, which is incompatible with the output from SQL Server (note the milliseconds). To make life easier when working woth models that describe MSSQL tables with datetime fields, using this behavior can make things a little easier.

At work a few months ago, I was directed to started looking into some options for developing small database applications. So, I set out on my quest to find the best solution out there. Several weeks, and at least as many frameworks later, I finally found a solution that seems to work.