Why I have settled for CodeIgniter

They all come in different shapes, sizes and color. Anything really. Cars, pens, niniis and kereas.

The PHP frameworks cannot be left behind. I have tried all with some various degrees of success.

I nearly gave up searching and learning and decided to design my own Framework doing all the common things I do in a pre-packaged manner. That is what a framework should do. Then cameth the enlightenment.

Kohana, YII (former PRADO), DOOPHP, Zend, CakePHP, Symphony all aim to address the purpose of a framework. To ease software development. But if I have to spend a month or 2 studying a framework, a new templating dialect, I am better off doing Erlang or Lua with my time. Seriously. By the time you start to master version 1.1, version 1.2 is released. With a completely NEW model.

Rasmus Lerdof suggests that NO ONE should use a framework. He suggests we all write a set of functions to do our common tasks and make our own ‘NoFramework’. I totally agree with this. Also, an analysis of all frameworks and models is here. CI wins.

The common failings are:

• Bloat-ware : Most systems come with alot of bloat. To just say HelloWorld, you need to load 100KB of files. Whatever happened to a simplicity?
• Tight-Coupling : Each library depends on 7 others to perform its basic tasks. One missing file, despite being totally unneeded, will render your app unusable.
• Cryptic OO – Most Framework developers are there to show off and even the most mundane PHP code is OO. Java-like classes to do simple things like DB disconnects, all for showoff. Programming/Coding is hard enough. Why add another layer of complication?
• Code that Makes coffee – Most development tasks are routine and if specialized code is needed, then plugable libraries are easier to develop/plug-in that trying to understand bundled one-solution-fits-all ‘FrameWorks’

So, Why Code-Igniter?

CodeIgniter is everything a PHP coder tired of doing the same code over and over would wish for to Santa.

I won’t type/copy-paste everything here and pretend to have come up with it so as to get traffic or an iPad, so here goes: Click and learn why.

I will start posting sites I will have done using CI here, soon.

Watch this space.

Back to code…

Wazi.