Archive for April, 2009

Lately I’ve been looking for ways to organize my code and be more productive. As i was reading my RSS feeds I stumbled upon an article that linked to the Codeigniter web site. After reading up on the benefits of Codeigniter I decided that I should look at other PHP frameworks and compare to see which ones I liked. I reviewed Zend, CakePHP, and Codeigniter because they use the MVC model that i find is a logical and effective way to organize my code.

While downloading Zend the first thing I realized was how heavy it was it was 24 MB zipped i didn’t even continue with the download. 24MB is way too much and it still doesn’t have the application in it so without even downloading it i crossed Zend out.

Next was CakePHP, Cakes download size is much more decent at just under 700kb once I downloaded it I started to read through the documentation. While looking at the way that Cake’s classes are organized I found them to be sort of a hassle to work with. Also even though there is good documentation I found that some of  it I had to read 2 or 3 time to actually get a full grasp of what a function or class does. At this point i hadn’t ruled out Cake but i wasn’t convinced that it was for me.

Finally I went back and reviewed Codeigniter. Codeigniter is a little heavier than Cake at 900kb but it is still a very reasonable size. The first thing I noticed about Codeigniter(CI) is its user guide I it took no more that 5 min to understand how CI implemented the MVC model. Almost immediately i fell in love with CI I find it super easy to use and it takes care of all the little things easily. Its DB class implements the Active Record Pattern which makes thing so easy. I don’t have to worry about where i missed the quote in a 10 line SQL statement and I don’t have to worry about escaping characters since it’s all take care of.

All in all I think Codeigniter takes care of all the simple things that take up most of your time. Take a look at CI here.