Recently I was offered a small gig to clone an existing web site. Being my first web project I searched for tools that allowed for Rapid Application Development in a fashion I was familiar with in procedural languages. My search brought me to ModelBaker.

ModelBaker takes the CakePHP framework, a proven foundation for RAD, and takes away the madness of a command line interface for something more elegant; a Mac interface.

This product accomplishes many things well. The complexities of the command line interface for CakePHP are gone. Checkboxes, drag-and-drop, and lists replace using the Terminal. If you have ever read any of the CakePHP tutorials, and all the hoops that a developer must go through to remember sequences of tasks to execute to 'bake' an application, you will quickly come to love ModelBaker for its simplicity and graphical portrayal of intricacies for CakePHP.

As an added bonus, ModelBaker can take your 'baked' web application and make it an iPhone web application. That is way kewl! I haven't tried that part yet because, sadly, I have no iPhone nor iPod Touch. [small tear forming... sniff]

If you want to visually analyze model entities and quickly come up with a working application that you can demonstrate concepts to an eager client, then give ModelBaker a spin. You still need to supply custom business rules, but the heavy lifting of database configuration and so much more are generated for you by ModelBaker and the underlying CakePHP foundation.

One of the goals of ModelBaker is to facilitate Rapid Application Development (RAD), and I would add Rapid Application Prototyping. (My friends and I call it RAP.) ModelBaker achieves this goal handily and has a well-articulated roadmap for future enhancements.

Start now to learn CakePHP the Mac way by using ModelBaker. I think you will be happy that you did. I am. (I would give it 5 stars, but I'm waiting for something on the roadmap...)