Posted on: October 21st, 2008   By: Jawad Khan
Under: Development, PHP

Few weeks ago, I started work to make my own PHP based MVC framework, all I wanted was a simpler and lighter MVC framework. I just intended to write a controller which can communicate with the model and views. In my googling, I found out CodeIgniter reviews, which were something like “a light weight PHP framework”. I started to look into CodeIgniter. I found it exactly as I was looking for. There was no need to re-invent the wheel, so I spent next few nights with the codeIgniter. I had already worked with Symfony and little bit with cakePHP, so the question arises why to look for any other PHP MVC framework? even when these both are the top frameworks in most comparisons. The answer is yes, Actually Symfony is really great framework for medium to large web applications. It’s good if project is very much scalable and got proper time-line. But If you got a project in which you really need to apply RAD ‘Rapid application development’, in which you do not have much time for deployments, framework installations, PEAR installations, framework plugins supports, You don’t want to do Propel build models and re-generate ORM classes or you simply can’t spend time on writing YAML schema files. In addition to these you also do not want your code to get messy, you really don’t want the business-logic and presentation together in single files OR you just want nothing fancy but a simple MVC framework where you just code and execute. So that’s where CodeIgniter fits in.

Not only CI is light weight, but to assist Programmers write faster code, it comes up with already made classes like: File uploading Class, FTP class, Email class (which supports HTML email, attachments), Pagination, Data encryption, calendar classes and few more. These all classes are by default part of CI. To use those classes, programmers need to include them in their actions. CI uses Active Record for database access, which is fairly simple. CI does all error logging just like the giant frameworks. CI also uses Search Engine Friendly URLs by default.

Now with open source PHP frameworks like CI, symfony and cakePHP, coding is done OOPs way, code remains managed and re-usable. Also Web-applications are built faster and scalable. The good thing about PHP related technologies is that they are open-source, which also means greater and world wide support through a healthy and ever growing community.