Tokyo and tech through the eyes of a split pea

Code Igniter goes full steam ahead!

(This is for you web-application developers out there)
I remember playing with PHP back in 1998 while interning at The Motley Fool and thinking it was fun to use, but was still quite young.  Microsoft’s ASP was a pretty dominant player, and Open Source Software hadn’t quite gained the respect it has now.

PHP has come a long way since then and matured quite nicely.  There’s even a younger competitor that goes by the name “Ruby on Rails” which competes in the same space (namely, web application development) that some feel is a viable threat.  But PHP’s larger user-base and maturer market means it won’t go down without a fight.  And today, PHP just gained a new teammate by the name of Code Igniter.

There are plenty of PHP frameworks floating around, some with large installed user bases, such as PRADO, CakePHP, and Symfony (not to mention PHP founders’ own Zend).  A simple Google search reveals a handy selection.  Alas, many of them attempt to brew your coffee and do your laundry, leading to hundreds of hefty files and questionable learning curves – depending on the features you require.  As frustrations mounted with managing someone else’s large code bases just to get their own code working, the time grew ripe for a slim, fast, easy-to-use PHP framework.  Last year these frustrated programmer’s wishes were teased by a little-known framework called Code Igniter.  Today, their wishes came true with the announcement of a formal development team to support Code Igniter’s growth.

If you’re thinking of developing an internet application, know some PHP, don’t want to waste your time learning a new framework while worrying that it might lose community support and go the way of the Dodo bird, and want something that can produce results fast, Code Igniter is for you.  But here’s the best part – if you know some PHP but aren’t sure if you should spend the time to learn Ruby on Rails for your next project because it feels like everyone else is, Code Igniter encourages the Model, View, Controller (MVC) programming paradigm – the very paradigm Ruby on Rails follows.  Which means you can code your next revolutionary idea now in PHP, and should you need to go with Ruby, you can focus on the faster syntactical changes rather than structural.

Of course, by that time you’ll probably want to do an entire code-rewrite, but at least you’ll be comfortable with the MVC framework!