Chris Hartjes is taking on what he calls his "next foolish project" - a console for the CakePHP framework.

On the CakePHP mailing list, somebody familiar with Ruby on Rails' console functionality asked "why isn't there one of these in Cake?" [...] So I got to thinking about how to do this. On the surface, it seems the easiest way to do this is to write a PHP script that takes entries on the command line, run the input through an 'eval' statement. Sounds easy enough, and I could write that in a hurry. I think the trickiness comes in figuring out how to hook it into CakePHP so that you can access Models that already exist.

For those attending the Vancouver PHP Conference, attend his talk and you might get amention of how far he's come with the idea. Otherwise, stay tuned to his blog for updates.