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I have to make some database requests with PHP on a MySQL database.
Question : What is the best (simpliest) framework to get thing done right CRUD (Create Read Update Delete)?
I also have to populate the database, what is a good tool to do that. The only one I know is SqlMyAdmin, wich does not look good. An online tool would be great.
Your experience is valuable: tell me what do you use and why ?
I have taken a look at CodeIgniter, looks nice, what do you think... overkill ?
For lots of operations (especially CRUD, which work out of the box once you've written the schema files), the ORM Framework Doctrine is really great.
If you want to go farther than just DB access, you might take a look at the PHP FRamework symfony, which provides an admin generator (there is even a screencast about that one).
(And has great documentation, such as the jobeet tutorial)
(BTW, symfony uses Doctrine as ORM ^^ )
But maybe it's a bit overkill (and requires a too big learning curve) if you need something simple...
To load data to MySQL, what about LOAD DATA INFILE, which (quote from the docs) "reads rows from a text file into a table at a very high speed".
I recommend GroceryCRUD because of the good engineering and documentation
Copy files into your web folder
Configure MySQL database
Specify MySQL table name
=> You get a paginated JqueryUI table with create/edit/delete buttons.
create/edit opens a form page based on the MySQL table schema. For example, a boolean, a varchar and a text get turned into a form with active/inactive radio buttons, a text field and a wysiwyg html editor.
Note: GroceryCRUD is built on CodeIgniter so you will have a copy living in your admin directory. You don't have to use it for building your main site.
Security Advisory: Any library can have undiscovered security vulnerabilities, so it is recommended to minimize exposure by protecting your copy of GroceryCRUD with BaseAuth and permitting SSL access only.
I'd second Pascal's comment re Symfony (I would uprate but not enough credit :-() - Symfony has a great admin generator, and once you get your head around the app->module->actions concept, it's straightforward and the documentation is fantastic, even if it is sometimes easier to search Google for it ;-)
Failing that, CakePHP is a lot better now than it used to be back in the early days, and you can get going with the minimum of fuss, particularly with their scaffolding which will help you set up a basic CRUD-style setup. Their documentation is also pretty awesome and very easy to read :-)
If solutions such as Doctrine, CAKE, CodeIgniter, etc. seem like overkill for what you're trying to do, I'd recommend a one-file PHP script I built that lets you CRUD hierarchical data in MySQL:
http://coding.pressbin.com/109/PHP-One-file-CRUD-front-end-for-hierarchical-MySQL-data/
Why do not you try to code it from scratch as CRUD is a common task of programming.
There are lots of good tutorials:
1>PHP PDO + Bootstrap Twitter: http://www.lizardgrid.com/blog/php-crud-tutorial-part-1/
2>JQuery + PHP: http://www.codeofaninja.com/2013/05/crud-with-php-jquery.html
I am currently testing JqGrid (a Jquery Table Library).
I have tried Grocery CRUD: looks nice, but its Datatables theme (which has column filtering ability) won't work with server-side processing, that's why I dropped it.
You may have a look at Cygnite Framework
It does basic code generation. Controller, model, views, layout, pagination, form component, required field validation, with bootstrap template etc. all these generate with simple command. You may alter the code based on your need.
Here is the tutorial- Generate CRUD application within 2 Min
Worth looking.
I'd say that totally depends on what you need to do.
You do know phpMyAdmin, right? You can import from a lot of formats with that tool.
Or do you want to develop an application with simple CRUD operations? Then a framework like Symfony or Zend Framework would be the right thing to be looking for.
I developed this script which reverse engineers from a MySQL database a set of stored procedures that list all the rows of a table, a single row based on the primary key, updates/inserts based on the primary key and deletes based on the primary key. It assumes that you already have your tables created with the primary keys setup per table and it generates the MySQL stored procedures for you. I have found that this is more efficient than similar types of solutions developed in PHP.
Something like http://www.notorm.com/ might be more appropriate than Symfony. Whilst I like Symfony and have used it to great effect, it is not simple.
Likewise with Codeignitor I would argue that any full stack framework (Laravel, Zend, Wii etc . . ) would not fit the remit of "simple".
A fairly straight forward and effortless crud system i found is https://github.com/usmanato360/crud360 its very easy to setup and there are loads of advanced features. It is unlike traditional crud systems that generate model classes etc.. it is just a single class that takes care of everything dynamically.
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For the past weeks I can't stop thinking about the architecture of a CMS I have to develop shortly. First of all I want to answer to the possible first questions that you could ask me.
Q: Have you read the similar questions on StackOverflow?
A: Yes, I have. Unfortunately none applies to what I have to ask.
Q: Why would you want to code another CMS???
A: Well, this is a bit of a long answer. Long story short: it has to be closed-source and it has to meet the requirements I need (it won't be 100% a CMS, it's a much more delicate subject - any project developed with it will be somewhere between 60-70% CMS and the rest will be custom code for that project's specific needs)
Tools of the trade:
PHP
Zend Framework (my personal choice; I'm very familiar with it and I won't change it for this task whatsoever)
What I need this "CMS" to be
Developer oriented
Since it won't be a pure 100% CMS it has to be developer oriented - easy to maintain, easy to develop against (more like the feeling when developing on an enterprise level framework)
User/Editor oriented
While working on a project like this one, any programmer might find himself going in a wrong way and not thinking the person who'll work as an editor using this CMS is not in fact a very technical person. This is the part where conflicts happen - if it's not simple to use, yet powerful enough, you will have a lot of problems to deal with.
i18n & l10
I'm almost certain it will be kind of a difficult task to code something both developer and user oriented and if I won't achieve this, I would like to give more importance to the developer instead of the editor. I am aware it's not a good deal to ignore the actual user of the software, but this CMS has to be fast to develop against.
Possible architecture patterns
1. General object
The first architectural design that got me thinking was the following:
I define a general object. The user/admin goes in the administration area and defines the data object he needs. Easy one.
The object page (for example) has a title field, a body field and a slug. It was just defined by the user and now he can create content based on this "data structure". Seems pretty neat, but I still didn't solve some of this architecture's problems.
How will those dynamic objects will be stored in the database? Should I use a dataTypes table, an objects table and link them many to many via objectProperties table?
Or maybe should I serialize them and store everything in the objects table?
Should I give the user the possibility to create new dataType properties and add them to its objects?
How will I i18n all of this?
Isn't too complicated to force the user to define its own data structures?
Will it be too messy if it will have a lot of data structures defined, multiple languages? Would it be still manageable?
2. Extreme developer oriented - scaffold data structures
Today I found myself thinking about this possibility. It would be pretty neat to define the data structure of an object in a yaml or ini file and then scaffold it's database table, model and CRUD. Also mention it's relations to other "data structure" objects to get the right CRUD implementation (think about page data structure and category data structure, for example).
Unfortunately this made me also think about several possible problems.
Will I be able to code such a scaffolding tool on top of Zend Framework? (which is known to be lacking scaffolding if we except the 2 or 3 suggestions made by the community, like this one)
Is too stupid to create 2 tables for each object so I can internationalize it?
Would it be too strict on the user if he can't define new data structures without the programmer?
Conclusion
I'm still very confused on how to approach this subject and what architecture to choose. At this very moment both are pretty challenging in terms of development.
My questions are pretty straight-forward.
If you would have to choose one of this approaches, which would it be and why?
Can you maybe suggest a more interesting pattern to follow, considering my needs?
Just some general advice, if you are really trying to manage free-form content then I would stay away from relational databases for storing your data and go with an XML solution. A relational database has too much structure for something that is purely content oriented. Think of a home page... You have info displayed like: welcome notice, about us, who we are. That doesn't really map well to a table / collection of tables especially when you start adding / removing some of those items. Something with a defined structure, like stack overflow, does map well to a relation datbase however.
Take a look at Day CMS, Apache Sling, Java Content Repository for some ideas.
http://www.day.com/day/en.html
http://sling.apache.org/site/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_repository_API_for_Java
From my point of view more options are always a problem. Users are mostly ignorant, when it comes to complex systems. Therefore I'd stick with the developer-oriented solution. Developer will decide what kind of content can be displayed. Optionally I would allow some kind of "open" content - for power users, allowing complex CSS/HTML/JS. Complex content like photo galleries, user profiles, etc. should not be designed by BFUs.
So to sum up - main feature - creating pages that can be dropped anywhere in the structure (that should be very flexible). If they want user profiles, you can create a new type of page. But at the end of the day, BFUs can do anything with enough time. It depends on the price/time scale. If they can pay for it and need it fast, they will make you create a new user profile page type, taht will be easy to fill. If they are kinda poor, they'll choose to setup all by themselves using normal page and WYSIWYG :D
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Ok so before anyone states the fact that the php framework question has already been answered, note that I am asking questions specifically on which framework would be best given the requirements that I am providing. I am currently in the proccess of building a large project. I will be in the future working on several medium/large and a few small projects. I am an experienced php developer and fully know OOP inside and out and have a great knowledge of mysql database so learning a system is not a problem.
Now that is out of the way down to what I am actually looking for. I have currently been using a "framework" that is not so great and was provided to me for my projects. I would like to get rid of the "framework" and actually start using an actual framework. I was thinking of building my own framework but was considering (and really leaning towards) using an already preexisting framework. I have looked at a bunch of frameworks and even played with a few of them out there. Once I choose a framework I am going to want to keep using it and not have to switch 6 months down the road so before I choose I will be doing some thorough testing before making the final decision. I would like to get some input from some users as to which ones would fit my needs best.
In a framework I am looking for the following items:
Speed - because of being larger projects I will need to keep speed in mind. I can write efficient code but if the framework is slow it really wont matter now will it :)
Authentication - I would like to be able to use some built in authentication if possible through the framework. I dont necessarily need granular permissions based on users but more or less through groups (granular permissions is not a turn off just not a requirement).
Ajax - I like to use ajax in my applications so I would like some kind of ajax implementation in the framework and personally I prefer jquery. It doesnt necessarily need to have built in ajax features but a way to kill the page with the ajax output before anything is output for efficiency.
Forms - I have seen that alot of frameworks have built in features for managing forms but just thought I would mention it here to save myself the headache.
Administration - This is possibly one of the most required features that I really need. I need to be able to create a backend to manage the site. I dont want to have to hack something together to make this work.
Api - I will be in need of an api for accessing/modifying data that I will be allowing.
Database - Built in database methods. Doesnt necessarily need to do it automatically, just give me access to be able to retrieve/update the data that is need.
These are not neccessarily requirements but more or less nice features:
I would like to be able to encase all of my data that goes with a certain item into a "module" of a sort. So that I could easily copy it to another site and have it all ready to go.
An easy to navigate structure. I would like to be able to go into controllers and not see 50 files but instead see maybe 10 folders with the files encased in the folders so that it is better separated.
I cant really think of anything else at this time but if I think of anything else I will update the post. I would really like to get feedback from people who are using any frameworks out there. If you havent messed with a framework please do not recommend it as you have no experience with it and will not know if it would suit my needs. Any help is appreciated.
EDIT:
I just wanted to edit this post to clarify some stuff. In the requirements/features that I am looking for I do not necessarily need all of the features to be built into the framework. From some of the responses it seemed as if people were thinking that all of this stuff has to be pre-ready. I more or less am looking for a framework that supports all of the features that I am looking for that is easily accomplished with the components in the framework. For example the administration, it does not have to have a default administration area but allow for me to create an administration easily from the components that I will be adding to the site.
From my own experience ( CodeIgniter , Zend Framework ), but realy all major frameworks will allow you to do everithing you asked .
Speed - CodeIgniter is the fastest i worked with , this is not the strongest feature of ZF , in fact where i work we all got to the conclusion that ZF is slow .
Auth - Zend Framework handles auth better than what i saw in other frameworks
Ajax - All major Frameworks will allow you do disable the layout/view , Zend is slightly better here , as you can have special json views.
Forms - CodeIgniter framework handles forms easyer than ZF , however all frameworks should deal with this problem with ease . Symfony needs to be mentioned here with it's form generator .
Administration - Symfony just becouse it has a nice crud form generator based on the tables you're passing ( "admin generator" how they are advertising it ) , witch will speed development quite a bit .
???
Database - ZF handles databases nicer in my opionion , however i've heard good things about Symfony too . CodeIgniter here is not that strict witch is not a good thing in my opinion .
Modular App - Building modules in ZF is realy easy , and the feature that i like most is that a module structure looks like the whole app itself ( eg. the whole app is a module ... )
Easy to navigate structure - All of them once you are used to it , however i don't like the fact that CodeIgniter keeps all it's controllers in one place , when in ZF you can add modules and separate things from one and another .
Well, I worked with several PHP frameworks in the past and there aren't many good frameworks. You could risk a look at Zend Framework
ok
ok (but not enterprise level)
ok, but dojo
complicated
no, its a framework, not an application
ok, but not really a ERM
encapsulates PDO in an ugly way (bad implemented factory pattern)
ZF is developed by Zend itself, but I wasn't really happy with that too, because it has a lot of shortcomings (cruel DBAL, complicated form handling, supports dojo instead of jQuery) and if you are used to Java/JBOSS or .NET it just sucks (only mentioning this because you are planning a big project).
If you have some time until your project needs to be deployed and if you dont need to start immediately, you could also try FLOW3 (still alpha) which is developed by the TYPO3 Team. I've played a little bit with FLOW3 and can say that it is the only PHP FW which has at least a good architecture and some good ideas/paradigms (AOP e.g.).
If I understand you in the right way you would need something like a CMS for your backend. Maybe it would be a good idea to evaluate exiting CMS's and check out if you could extend them (use the CMS as framework (TYPO3 e.g.)).
You wont find a FW that matches exactly your needs, therefore you should consider choosing a CMS/FW and customize it in the way you need it. If the project is as big as I imagine there should be enough resources for such task.
I am fond of dbstructure definition of msaccess which lets defining at once and creating the data entry forms, datatables and reports at once easily.
I have been searching for some framework which would generate the data entry forms, data tables and reports easily. I guess the only thing I need to define is complete datatable structure.
Is there any like that or better one than that?
EDIT:
well i am afraid that PHP frameworks have been limited to programmers only. I would like to extend it with some automated functions like autoform in msaccess which would generate data entry form, auto report for data listing. So that my development time would be again some less. I found doctrine nearly matching my specification but not sure as i haven't fully explored doctrine
Cake offers both "hard" (bake) and "soft" scaffolding, which should be very close to what you want. It's still only meant as a quick proof-of-concept tool and to get you up and running faster so you can concentrate on programming the business logic. It's not meant as a hands-off solution nor to be used in production.
What you seem to be looking for is a database frontend like phpMyAdmin or SQL Buddy, not a PHP framework.
Symfony provides an admin generator that builds all the forms on the fly and it will also update itself when you change your db schema. It is based on doctrine which you say you looked at so that would make things a bit easier for you.
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I know ASP.NET C# very well. I make a lot of stuff like surveys and custom web applications.
I'm having a lot of trouble wrapping my head around Drupal and figuring out how to do 'special' programmatic things, like searching a list of clients, or creating a web application.
1 - I've been reading books and drupal API but I'm still having a lot of trouble getting started with anything at all. Where does custom code go in respect to pages, modules, snippets...? How do I replicate form X that I did in ASP.NET into a new page in drupal? Etc. It is super hard to wrap my head around Drupal, it seems so large and easy and extensible yet also like it is difficult for me to code. What can you recommend for an ASP.NET application programmer to learn to work with/in Drupal?
2 - Sometimes we write complete ASP.NET applications for clients, and these applications are not indended for clients to go editing them. For example, we will have our entire website in drupal, but inside of that website we will have a place for users to use a special search for database information. We don't want simple website editors and content providers trying to edit this specially coded page(s). How do I handle not wanting clients to edit anything in a Drupal application? Is it handled via page/user permissions? Is the best thing to develop and host an application completely outside of drupal? Is the drupal application it's own drupal instance inside of a drupal website (nested drupals?) ?
3 - Lastly, how do I handle databases? I understand Drupal and PHP are set to work best with MySQL. We have MS SQL databases that are used by multiple applications and would like to use them for new applications as we start using Drupal. For example, we have a Staff directory that feeds ASP.NET reporting application, ASP.NET Staff Listing application, and want to make a new Drupal PHP application that also uses (and perhaps inserts/updates more information into) that database. What is the best/easiest way to handle MS SQL databases and/or MySQL databases being used and updated by multiple Drupal and ASP.NET applications? Would it be easier to have all the applications use the MS SQL databases, or maybe to replicate the databases on MySQL for the Drupal/PHP apps and somehow sync the two databases?
I hope it is alright if I ask multiple related questions in a single post.
I'm afraid that I don't have any experience with Drupal so I can't offer any insights into your first or second questions, but on the third question:
What is the best/easiest way to handle
MS SQL databases and/or MySQL
databases being used and updated by
multiple Drupal and ASP.NET
applications?
If you are going to perform CRUD operations from both your ASP.NET applications and your PHP/Drupal applications, then I would recommend against trying to sync data back and forth between MySQL and MSSQL since this will cause latency problems plus you'll then have to deal with the differences between the two database management systems.
Instead, I would recommend that you look at using stored procedures to control all database accesses. This way you can ensure that all of your database CRUD operations conform to same rules and logic.
Using MSSQL in both ASP.NET and PHP shouldn't be a problem, especially not with the very excellent PDO library that provides a standard interface for accessing a number of popular database management systems. It should allow you to quickly and easily connect with and begin using your MSSQL databases within your PHP applications.
It is some good questions you ask. I'll try to answer them to the best of my ability. I haven't any experience with c# of APS.NET, so I don't know exactly where you are coming from. I myself learned Drupal as an inexperienced python/django developer. So in some ways I can understand some of the troubles you are going through trying to learn Drupal. Some of these things will simply require time/experience/experimenting before it will go away.
To really understand Drupal and the Drupal API you will first need a good understanding of PHP. Sometimes Drupal do some complex PHP things, so if you don't understand the syntax or the PHP functions etc, you can easy get lost.
Where do code live?
Drupal is built as a moduler system. Drupal itself is a set of modules, some of which are required for Drupal to work properly. If you want make some custom code, that is you want to do something, that you can't use a module for. There are about 5000 modules developed for Drupal. Often even when being a skilled programmer, the best choice is to find a module that will do what you need or can get you where close. So what you do, it to create a module of your own.
Make a folder with the name of the module
Create a modulename.info inside it which holds some info about the module formatted in a special way. Drupal will need it to fx display the module on the module list page where you activate modules.
Lastly create a modulename.module file where the core of your code for the module will be.
Another thing that is important to understand with Drupal, is that it uses a hook based system. Hooks are like events that fire once certain things happen that you want to hook into and either alter the flow, or do some things of your own. Fx you could record every time a specific form was displayed, or you could alter the form, adding/removing fields.
Forms
Drupal has a FAIP or Form API, that is uses to generate form, this is something that has it's own page in the documentation. The idea is that you create an associative PHP array which holds information about each element of the form, and Drupal will use that to create the form.
Books
There are a lot of good books for Drupal that you can learn from. The book I myself have learned the most from is Pro Drupal Development
First of all, Drupal has a very fine grained role based permission system, that will allow you to setup exactly what your clients are allowed to do. You can create different roles, like moderator, content creator, admin, sysadmin ect, and give different permissions to each role. This is pretty easy and is setup within the Drupal AI. However, you will need to know the permissions as some are super permissions that will give access to a lot of things. Now for integrating your applications, that is something that you probably want to write a custom module for. I don't know exactly how you want to do this. But I think the best result would be gotten by letting Drupal create the pages, forms etc from your application and just send data back and forth. That way the theme = layout of the site would be consistent. That way users wouldn't get the feeling that they left the site, but this simply was yet another feature the site offered.
Drupal is not just set to handle MYSQL best, You will actually need either MYSQL or PSQL as your drupal database backend. The reason is the way Drupal handles queries, that allow you to write non specific queries that will work, no matter on which of the two types you use, or if your tables has a prefix. So for all of the Drupal internals you will need one of the two. PHP can connect to MSSQL and run queries against that database, so you could without much problems write custom code that run queries to your other application's databases and either fetch or update data. Depending on the data, you might want to create a table in your database that you can read and write to, and then sync the databases when needed. It depends a bit on your use case. I have done the latter, in the case where I didn't need to write to the database, but only needed to fetch some product information form a legacy database that was still being used by other systems.
First of all, I think what's important to understand Drupal's limitations, there are things it's not really made for. It's sort of a web application framework but if you're doing a lot of custom work with your own custom datamodelling and stuff, Drupal might not be the most flexible or easily implementable solution to your kinds of problems. A more general framework like for instance Zend Framework might be more suited.
An important lesson in learning Drupal is: don't hack core or other modules. This will make upgrading core or modules very time-consuming. Instead "do like Drupal" and override using hooks. In theming you can also override with hooks, but also in other ways. Overriding is powerful so understand that concept well.
I'd say, pick a way of learning that is your style, screencasts, IRC, hacking, user meetups IRL, books, articles or any combination and look for material on Drupal. Just start mucking around and get a feeling and understanding of how Drupal works. Understanding the jargon is an important part, so what are: nodes, blocks, regions, hooks, modules, themes.
Drupal has a very flexible permission system, and it's probably the best choice to use that instead of making your own. You can write your own modules that add to or alter the behavior of Drupal. So if you want to write a new application that works with Drupal you can write a module performing the functionality the application has to have and make use of all the facilities Drupal offers, including users, the permission system, etc, etc. I don't really understand the last part of your second question "Is the drupal application it's own drupal instance inside of a drupal website (nested drupals?) ?". Drupal is a collection of PHP files on a server that, together with a slew of tables in a database serves request made to it. Multiple Drupal websites (so different PHP files) can reference the same database or parts of it (for example the user table). There's not really an "instance" of a Drupal site, as there's not really an "application". I could of course be too unfamiliar with these terms but I don't think PHP works with "instances" of "applications".
That's a hard problem, afaik Drupal doesn't work with MS SQL, so any connections in that direction you might have to make yourself. I'd also ask around the Drupal forums or on IRC.
Good luck!
rlb,
I've done quite a bit of Drupal and have strong ASP.NET experience. You really need to read up to get your mindset straight. They use layers in an MVC-like fashion that is very foreign to WebForms & ASP.NET MVC developers ... and quite frankly at first seems odd.
Here's a list of things I did to get really, really good quickly:
Get a host like at hostgator for $8 which will let you install Drupal
Get the book Pro Drupal Development for Beginners ... excellent and really covers a lot of areas http://www.amazon.com/Pro-Drupal-Development-Second-Beginning/dp/1430209895/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1257545528&sr=8-2
Get on the Drupal forums
Be ready to contribute. Drupal has a lot of features, but in the end the best way is to be someone who contributes code back
There are a number of IDEs to consider, but to start a text editor should be fine.
Good luck.
Some good answers here, so I'll just fill in some brief items.
1 - Learning Drupal: Pro Drupal Development is the best book for this. Getting into the issue queues and interacting with developers is a way to get familiar with specifics. Your question about forms relates to how Drupal handles forms. The FAPI is pretty robust in Drupal, and protects you from security gaffes. Also api dot Drupal dot org is where the code is documented, though there are docs elsewhere. Google is your friend. (On the Drupal site itself, use the native search to get faceted results.)
2 - This is a user permissions issue. You can limit creation and editing permissions based on content type. For access control (read), you will want to use one of the many modules for access control. It really depends upon your use case.
3 - Drupal has the most community support for MySQL, but people run Drupal on MS SQL as well. In Drupal 7, you will likely see much more support for non-MySQL as this release introduces database abstraction.
Probably the worst thing to do is hack around the margins. It really pays to learn the ins and outs of the Drupal basics -- administration and coding -- so that you can truly leverage the power Drupal brings to the table.
And if you're hunting for modules, http://drupalmodules.com is your friend. ;)
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Is there any thing in PHP to create basic scaffold, like in Rails?
EDIT: I need something to prototype quickly..
Some frameworks like Symfony, CakePHP, Akelos, CodeIgniter and others have support for scaffolding.
However if you don't want to use a framework you can try phpScaffold which generates CRUD scaffold pages based on phpMyAdmin table exports...
I also wanted some fast prototyping, but I wanted it to generate the code, so it's easy to update it. I made many improvements on phpScaffold (HTML5, nice CSS, many models at once, etc) which are published on http://github.com/tute/phpscaffold.
Phreeze makes this simple and easy. http://phreeze.com/
QCodo is another great option. And since it uses reflection to do Code Generation instead of reflection at runtime, you'll likely see better performance.
First, Rails is a framework. PHP is a language. PHP does not have built-in scaffolding support, just as Ruby--the language Rails is build on--does not. A framework like CakePHP, however, does support scaffolding.
Second, I see that you raised an objection to CakePHP because "you still have to do a bunch of stuff." That's true--with any framework, you're going to have to learn new conventions, configurations etc.
CakePHP got plenty of scaffolding options
If you throw Crud + API plugin on top, you basically got everything you need, with tons of nice additions
cakephp-crud: The active successor of the two projects below. Provides both Crud actions, API, Scaffolding, Searches and more
Crud Plugin: https://github.com/nodesagency/Platform-Crud-Plugin
API Plugin: https://github.com/nodesagency/Platform-API-plugin
They all utilize CakePHP events, so its really simple to extend and modify the default behavior
For myslef I Use CodeIniter for development, sure they have scaffolding, but only in terms of a "simple scaffolding" which mean you're not gonna use it in live product (i dunno about everyone but i'm only using it as some tools) .
but if you need some like CRUD generator you can use SparkPlug , or Ignition both of them can be used on Codeigniter
This was asked quite some time ago, but if it's still relevant check out this nice scaffolding class (check the demo)
Yiiframework has a good code scaffolding system called Gii. It's web based. Once you create the tables, you can generate the CRUD classes from within the browser. No command line needed. I like this scaffolding.
If you use CakePHP as the web framework it supports scafalding. See this link for more info. http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/controllers/scaffolding.html
I'm not sure what the SO policy is for dead thread revival but I figured I would add my own two cents in case none of the above solutions were satisfactory. If you're looking for a PHP-based MySQL scaffolding tool, check out AMPLE Scaffolder. The entire package is contained within a single PHP file (less than 200k) that can simply be dropped into a web accessible directory whereupon you have immediate access to local and remote MySQL databases based on the internal database permissions. No schema exporting, configuration files, or other hassles. Plus, there's a whole lot of other capabilities to offer as well. Just thought I'd share it in case you were looking for another option. Feel free to check it out and post feedback if you have any questions.