I used my first PHP framework today, CodeIgniter, and I secretly loved it.
Saving poor developers’ sanity
I felt the need to keep my delight under wraps as if I has told my boss
how much easier creating dynamic web systems is now going to be, they
might not appreciate me as much!
Up until now, I always
mistakingly thought of such frameworks as Zend, CakePHP, etc as
requiring special servers or too proprietary to be able to use in my
everyday work.
A fellow coder today put me onto CodeIgniter,
which is an open-source PHP framework. It runs on PHP4 enabled servers
and should run on most cheap rental server web hosting. MySQL support is
built-in and you have the ability to change what database you will run.
Countless time-saving features and extendability options exist, as does
a thriving support community.
What CodeIgniter really allows
me to do is build an MVC Object-Oriented PHP web system in a fraction of
the time it would take building from scratch. The low-level
connectivity to databases, validation classes, etc are already setup for
me out of the box, so I can better spend my time developing the
higher-level site features and make my company happy.
Running
it locally, it is supremely faster than WordPress on my USB-connected SD
card under MAMP and XAMPP. Probably due to it’s caching, one of
countless features of CodeIgniter.
Stay tuned for more CodeIgniter reports and tests of other frameworks as I sample them.
