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.
