Is CakePHP good for Socail Network development

I am in the process of developping a SN couple with many other features and expect million of users and my development company is suggesting CakePHP to go with instead of regualr PHP. What are the Adv and Diadvanrages. Does this support Prrepared Stattements.

 

I'm building a CakePHP SN right now and we've created a lot of tools for a social network. The first thing you need to know : when you are building a website the language or the framework (if you are using a decent one at least...) is barely the bottleneck of your application. FaceBook was built on top of PHP (not reputed to be the fastest language out there).

A framework (like its name suggest it) is a frame for your work. It will give you best practices, a good design pattern (most of the time MVC), an orm, a way to handle session/auth you are not reinventing the wheel and thus you can work faster. Framework abstracts you from low level details and protects you from basic level error (SQL). You'll get tools such as i18n, cache and of course you'll get a lot of plugins. If you are working on a project this huge, you'll need a framework (CakePHP Symfony Laravel...Whatever)

Disadvantages ? Learning curve. But compared to advantages doesn't matter

Yes you can use prepared statements in CakePHP doing something like

$db = $this->getDataSource();
$db->fetchAll(
    'SELECT * from users where username = ? AND password = ?',
    array('jhon', '12345')
);
$db->fetchAll(
    'SELECT * from users where username = :username AND password = :password',
    array('username' => 'jhon','password' => '12345')
);

PHP: