Has anyone attempted to integrate the Cappuchino javascript framework into a CakePHP based backend. is this recommended? As CakePHp can populate views with HTML is there any advantage of a frontend based framework on top of it? This question is not limited to cappuchino/cakephp but to code igniter and sproutcore for instance.
Any links to any working implementations is greatly appreciated.
It all depends on what kind of experience you want to give your user.
If you want to have a single page application, that is only loaded once, and acts more like a desktop app, with data loading via XHR requests.
If you want many pages that each do something different (you can still load data in the background, github.com style)
The first is when you would choose something like SproutCore or Cappuccino. In this canse you would not use the HTML view capabilities of your server framework (CakePHP/Code Igniter), but instead use them to get data from the database and send it down in JSON format.