Codeigniter – I like PHP again!
In the last few years my focus was on .Net, I love C# with all my heart(my wife does not read this blog, so I am free to say that). It is the language that is structured enough and at the same time powerful and flexible. There have been many advances in .Net, WPF and MVC are exactly what was needed by the development community. Although there are still issues with .Net that have to be resolved, I feel that the framework itself is on the right track. With all my love for .Net I have forgotten about one of the languages that I had started my coding with – PHP.
One of the greatest advantages of .Net as to compare to scripting languages like PHP is ability to really trace the code diving into smallest details. I have hard time imagining debugging something without ability to “watch” the variables that I am working on. Visual Studio is a very well written IDE, I can’t even think of an IDE that comes close to VS, so I got spoiled by all this luxury, until a week ago my boss came up with a project that required use of PHP.
I decided to take on the project myself, wanted to refresh the stuff I knew about PHP and all that. By saying that I would be taking on this myself, I mean the back end, after all my designing skills are very limited and I had given up on creating nice UI long time ago. Will, the UI dude would be making this thing look nice. So after accepting the project, I had started reading on what is going on with PHP, and guess what, there have been some incredible things that were released since I last worked on PHP. Which should not be a surprise, progress can’t be stopped, just me with my deep submersion into .Net stayed completely oblivious to this part of coding. This is how I found Codeigniter.
Now, nobody is paying me for this (I wish someone did), so this is an honest plug of the framework that was done so well, I had coded that silly file sharing thingy that my boss wanted in about 3 days. Keep in mind, this was just the back end, now Will is goofing around with design, and I am sure he will do great, as usual. I found that Codeigniter made my work so much easier. Great documentation is written for the framework, there is a forum and even an IRC channel. To me, this represented a great change from the wild days of my PHP coding. I would recommend Codeigniter to everyone who is interested in doing work with PHP quickly.
Other great things I used on this project – Aptana Studio (excellent IDE, still have not figured out how to use that build in Subversion plugin) and WAMP.
I prefer the branch off called Kohana PHP.
Oh you might want to take a look at Netbeans too.
Hi EllisGl, thanks I will definitely take a look at it. I had to come back to PHP after about 5 years, and I have to say I was truly amazed at how much things have changed.
I prefer Code Igniter over Kohana since CI has MUCH better documentation, a very active and helpful community and it rated as one of the fastest, lightweight PHP frameworks out there.
I second trying out Netbeans, it’s subversion plugin is top notch.
Dude, please, for the love of God, please increase the size of your blog’s fonts. 11px is just not enough. Or at least up the line spacing so we can read.
Good post though : )
n0xie, I have not seen Kohana, but the documentation for CL is very detailed, with bunch of examples. That’s one of the reasons I liked it.
MJ, thanks, will increase it, I suck at UI.
SeanJa – will try it out next time, I already have a project in mind, just for fun.
CI is pretty great, I keep trying to convince .Net developers that they are doing things the hard way.
@n0xie: I’ve been working on some tutorials. I should have another one out next friday.
Yeah, I agree CodeIngiter is such a great framework. I stumbled across it a few months ago and am writing my latest project in it… it really does at least halve the amount of time you have to spend coding a back-end. Highly Recommended.
d.
Codeigniter is awesome, but I also like cakephp. For writing code I use komodo editor.
Hi, gr8 post thanks for posting. Information is useful!
I’m a .NET developer and a die hard fan and I just started using PHP with CI for one of my projects. I completely agree with you, it has made my PHP experience much more pleasant. As others have mentioned, I use Netbeans (I love their SVN plugin) along with XAMPP although nothing ever comes close to VS. Its THE best IDE out there.
I’m thinking of experimenting with CakePHP in the future. I’ve heard many good things about it.
I like a lot C# <3, but what about Zend Framework?, powerful, great components, great documentation, lucene, google data, amf support, shipped with dojo, etc, anyway, there are great frameworks on php
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@Jay
You could try zend server (a php stack), great integration with IIS and SQL Server.
I’m also primarily a .NET developer but am working in PHP for my own start-up. Using CI has definitely made development a more pleasant experience. If you really like Visual Studio as an IDE then VS.php is a must. It allows you to develop in php whilst remaining in the familiar Visual Studio IDE. Juan from jcx software is doing an amazing job at developing it and each release is getting better and better.
Thanks Dan, I will look into it for sure.
Great Post! Really very interesting. I enjoyed a lot. Thanks.
I use free PHP IDE Codelobster PHP Edition with special CodeIgniter plug-in.