In his latest blog post today, Felix Geisendörfer shares his "ultimate bootstrap technique" for CakePHP without having to render a page.

Ok, I shouldn't use such a buzz-headline, but I was very happy today, when I discovered a new way to bootsrap CakePHP wihout having to render a page. This is especially useful when you try to embed CakePHP in existing php apps (drupal, wordpress, ..., ?), or when you try to write unit tests for highly coupled classes such as Controllers or Models.

Basically, the technique involves tricking the Dispatcher into not rendering based on the $_GET values by making it think that it's being asked for the favicon.ico file.