# On Transition With the launch of Lithium now almost a couple weeks behind us, I've had some time to process and reflect on things. First and foremost, we'd like to thank everyone who helped make the launch such a big success. In 10 short days, we've made tremendous progress, and spawned [several sub-projects](http://rad-dev.org/projects/type:all), from plugins that extend the framework, to example applications to [rockin' micro-apps](http://anologue.com/). Secondly, we want to address what we can only describe as confusion; mainly from people in the CakePHP community who saw what was happening and went looking for a fight. Sorry to disappoint, but there just isn't one to be had. Instead, we acted our ages, agreed to disagree, and went our separate ways. Sadly, everybody seems to love controversy, and this comes out in both big and small ways, i.e. jokes about the "Powered by CakePHP" badges at the bottoms of pages on our [project site](http://rad-dev.org/) — the site is based on [The Chaw](http://thechaw.com/), which is a CakePHP application, and it works perfectly well. Why try to hide that? The origins of Lithium are in CakePHP, and that's something we're proud of. There is also a smaller, more vocal minority, who have the very distinct impression that we now hate CakePHP. Others can speak for themselves, but Garrett and I are very proud of the 4 years of hard work that we put into Cake. It's a great project, and the experience of bringing it to where it is today has been amazing. Our contributions to CakePHP clearly aren't in question, so what is driving this attitude? This is probably going to sound arrogant, but we think some people feel that our moving on from CakePHP implies that we're somehow judging them. [Revolutionary Road](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0959337/) is a film set in a 1950's-era Connecticut suburb which illustrates this perfectly. It tells the story of a couple who decide to move to Paris, and how this decision changes the their interactions with those around them. By wanting to live in Paris, the implication is that their current situation (a Conneciticut suburb) is not enough, and they want something else, something more. Consequently, their neighbors, being in same situation are forced to question themselves. Not liking what they find, they react negatively, assuming there must be something wrong with the couple. Why else could they want something different? People are often averse to change, so they choose fear over progress. That's because fear is easy, it doesn't take any will or effort. This isn't a new idea, but we forget it so easily. I once heard it said that if you look at code you wrote two years ago, a year ago, or even a few months ago and don't throw up a little bit, you're not advancing. For those of us who actually care about software development as a craft, this is deeply important. Which brings us to Lithium. Lithium began life as a series of small scripts cobbled together out of curiosity, to see what interesting things could be done with PHP 5.3. Those scripts grew into a small collection of classes designed to put those curiosities to use on practical problems. It took the best things of CakePHP, and tried to make them even better. It also took some of its pain points, and tried to use what we'd learned to find solutions for them. In doing these experiments, we had to question a few assumptions. At the time, we believed that migrating to PHP 5 would be easy. We'd simply rewrite the parts that aren't strict mode compliant, and life would be good. Unfortunately, life isn't that simple. For the past four years, we'd been developing a framework against PHP 4. By the time 5.3 dropped, it would be very, very dated technology. To say that a lot had change between PHP 4 and 5.3 would be a gross understatement. 5.3 introduced entirely new _paradigms_ in PHP development. Spanning that gap at all, let alone effectively, is a challenge to say the least. Even if you can pull it off, you inevitably lose something in the process. On top of that, coding against dated technology, among other things, has resulted in the accumulation of almost 4 years of technical debt. It's a very tough obstacle to surmount. Fortunately, we're leaving the code in the hands of [a very adept and energetic Canadian](http://mark-story.com/) [and friends](https://trac.cakephp.org/wiki/Contributors). We wish the CDC team well. Obviously, CakePHP isn't going anywhere. As for us, well, we're not suggesting you go out and write any major production apps on Lithium just yet, but we're very excited about what we have to share, and we hope you will be too. ~ Nate ~