CakePHP 43,091 (github.com/cakephp/cakephp (https://github.com/cakephp/cakephp 8,791 ), MIT) appeared in April 2005, six years before Laravel 2,157 , and brought Ruby on Rails 14,565 ' convention over configuration to PHP. An ArticlesController expects an ArticlesTable class for the articles table, an Article entity per row and templates in templates/Articles/; follow the names and nothing needs wiring. The ORM splits each model into a table class (queries, associations, validation, behaviors) and an entity class (one row), and bin/cake bake generates tables, entities, controllers and templates from an existing schema. The current release is 5.4.2 (6 September 2026, PHP 8.2+); the cakephp/app skeleton installed cleanly on PHP 8.5.4 here, and bin/cake version printed 5.4.2. Choose it for schema-driven business applications where strict conventions and scaffolding beat flexibility.