Railslike PHP Framework: Code Igniter | Hacker News Reader

Railslike PHP Framework: Code Igniter

codeigniter.com

13 pointsjdavid33 comments

I've used CI on several projects. I've also used Rails. Here's my take on CI.

The good stuff:

* GREAT documentation * Code was designed around performance, and it is pretty darn quick. * PHP4 based. (This, btw, is only a plus for a tiny few people. There's no need to be on PHP4 any more.)

The bad:

* The "model" layer is not really an ORM at all. It's just a slightly fancy way of wrapping SQL statements. This is better than no separation of concerns, but it's not really an object oriented way of accessing the model layer. * It misses out on all the great things that are going on with PHP5. * It's open source but privately developed. The pace of evolution is glacially slow, and decisions about the direction of the framework are made closed doors.

To me, CI is a HUGE advance over throwing code together in php files, but it doesn't really have enough abstractions to qualify as a true MVC framework.

If you do decide you like CI, check out kohana php. This is an open source, community developed fork of CI -- that's built for PHP5.

For what it's worth, I'm far happier coding in Rails (and the little bit of django I've tried), and would probably recommend those if you're not afraid of abandoning php.

http://coordinatr.com is built on CodeIgniter. CI has some of the best documentation of any Framework and it's super fast compared to others like CakePHP and Symphony. Of course, it's still PHP so there are some limitations, but overall it's been great.

I don't really like the Rails comparison that people make. It's PHP and it's significantly less "magical" than rails.

but Rails made MVC extremely popular, and the directory structure and admin function names are very similar (at least from a non rails user like my self)

Very true. The problem I have with calling it a rails clone is that people expect things like scaffolding, ORM, and auto code creation. CI has scaffolding, but it's only for admin use, not production, and while there are libraries that can do the ORM and code creation, they aren't as well integrated as Rails. Still it's lightweight and fast which is why I use it.

i think the differences are more based on the "base" install rights of ruby, vs, the base install rights of php.

many php servers do not have the option to run a cron job, and i think ruby can hold a state, where php runs the script for each request.

Are you talking about shared hosting packages? I think judging a language or framework based on the shared hosting packages available is probably one of the less effective arguments...

I found this from 4braham in Madison, WI. the framework videos make it look exactly like rails, but in PHP. i think its pretty neat, but if i was going to use it i would still have to abstract a custom MODEL for it, because we are using S3 as our data store. I might code my datastore towards their model if this becomes a popular framework.

what do other YC'ers think about Code Igniter?

Frankly I love it. Compared to other PHP frameworks I've used I think CI's way of doing things is pretty straight forward (but I suspect that Symfony comes close). Although I some qualms on how it uses validations, how CI's model implementation is different from Rails(personally it's not as magical as Rails implementation but I dig CI's more).

So I decided to tinker with the framework and fork my own implementation.

My framework is now built on top of CI and is able to use functional programming idioms such as anonymous functions and the like. Pretty awesome stuff.

Functional programming in PHP? How? And, is it efficient? I know PHP has a callback mechanism, but am more curious about the anonymous functions claim...

Well basically I found this old library in PHP created by Ian B,Kos. His library allows certain functional programming idioms using PHP. What I basically did was fix the library up in order for my version of CI to utilize the library.

Is it efficient? well according to the original author you take a minor hit it performance (as of yet he has not provided any solid numbers) in exchange for programmer happiness.

The implementation of anonymous functions is quite clever. Please consider this library was created 4 years ago and has remained stagnant up until now. To put it shortly he uses a eval based approach in order for use of anonymous functions.

Care to share? Or at least point me to the original library? I had found a few things http://ioreader.com/2007/05/03/php-closures/ and http://www.steike.com/code/php-closures/ a while ago...

well I tried going to the original site and unfortunately it seems to be down. Tell you what maybe we can connect via email or chat or something. I can hand you the original source code of the library. Be aware though it's not the most elegantly documented piece of code. But it's commented heavily and you can learn a great deal of how PHP works and how the author worked around it's limitations.

My email address is in my profile, which I believe pg said at one point users can see if they are logged in. If not, let me know. Edit: The sample of 5 i checked didn't show an email address... It's my username here at google's service.

Did you get my email yet? I'm not sure if the email address that's on your site is the right one.

No, php's implementation of anonymous functions is not efficient. When create_function is called it stores that created function globally which doesn't allow garbage collection. Making it pretty much useless to use in callbacks or when defined within a loop. Watch the memory increase for the following test:

while (true) { create_function('', ' return 0; '); }

Shhh, don't tell anybody--it'll just ruin it.

We are currently using CI on a pretty big project and I have both good and bad things to say about it. The good news is that it is a "rails like" framework, but without the magic. Some of the helpers are really nice, the validation lib is pretty nice allowing for callbacks to both validate and alter data. Problems I have with it are support for transactions, which seem to be there but fail miserably when something goes wrong. If an exception is thrown the transaction has begun but it never hits a rollback, so all those queries are hanging in the balance and never get commited or rolled back. There is also this recurring theme in CI that they had to do everything themselves. This means that instead of using a well established Email lib they wrote their own, which has severe limitations. You can extend these all of these classes and easily integrate others so Email wasn't so big of a deal. We are just using phpmailer instead. You cannot however extend the DB class. You have to hack up the original, which is what we have been doing to provide SQL queries in the log file during development, and transactions that actually work. This wasn't too bad to do, but it is already introducing a problem. Upgrading from 1.5.whatever to 1.6 breaks the modifications that we did. So now we have the problem of versioning our own copy of CI with our fancy DB stuff, and the actual product we are developing. That being said it is the best PHP programming experience that I have ever had.

The validation lib can be improved upon but I just hate the idea of sticking into a controller function (I just move it the model, currently I'm writing a lib that should remedy this). Still I have to agree that allowing callbacks is a nice feature.

Quick question how good is PHPMailer compared to CI's native Email lib? Was planning to use the latter for our company's web app.

CI's email library has 3 modes: PHP Mail, Sendmail, or external SMTP server. In my experience, using Sendmail is very fast if you have a mail server installed on your webserver. I haven't tried PHPMailer because I haven't found CI's mail library to be missing anything that I needed.

The reason why we started using it was we are required to send out HTML email. This sucks I know, but it wasn't an option. I found that CI's email lib had problems with sending out HTML mail with images as attachments and referencing those images in the HTML. Absolute image urls were not an option either.

Here's a CI S3 library: http://www.haughin.com/2008/02/02/amazon-s3-the-future-of-al...

We use Code Igniter on all of our sites you see in my profile.

Love it, love it. Has its issues, but I can't really put into words how useful it has turned out to be for our team.

We may very well go with Django long-term, but I've never spent a day regretting that we're using CI. And this from a guy who has always had a fairly low hacker opinion of PHP. CI kinda changed that a good bit once I pushed back my skepticism.

I highly recommend it for PHP developers who want to move to the MVC model and get a lot of ROI on their development time.

If you're comfortable with Ruby or Python, you'll enjoy the other frameworks more, of course. But I wouldn't use PHP on its own without Code Igniter.

just started reading up on it. Glad to see people building on it. btw, @jdavid if you find/build a model + plugin that works with s3 easily, that would be awesome. I think you might just have to mod their file upload mod btw.

Right now i have customers that want to pay me, but i don't have a back end. I would love to just get something done now in prototype, so i can build a real nice MVC later on.

in the "RAILS MVC" pattern i have only tutorial experience and now the code ignite tutorial behind me. I come from a C# world, so a lot of this is still new to me. We decided to move from C# because php5.2 is so awesome, and mono was becoming a scary rabbit hole. Code Igniter is an exciting idea.

I am curious what the best way is to extend a model in CI. it looks like a few days work just to think about it. i think if we bring in 4braham in Madison, WI we might be able to build a decent set of classes though. ThruDB also launched today for ubuntu, so i would like to build in the hooks for thrudb and memcache on s3 objects so that it is built for scalability and simplicity.

i am not using s3 as a just a file store, we are using it as an XML store most of the time, so in essence its replacing my need for a DB, which is hard to scale.

we have a smart client so as long as i can publish xml, smart widget can read it, and since we are not using javascript, we can read XML so effortlessly in flash.

That's a PHP4 framework. It's a bad idea to use PHP4, because 5 has so many useful new things, performance improvements, SPL, etc. In the OO area, PHP5 is practically a new language.

Are you looking for a PHP5 version? Here's a fork:

http://kohanaphp.com/

Haven't tried it yet.

From my experience it has some awkward workarounds if the framework is dropped in a PHP5 environment. Nonetheless it's simple and transparent enough to hack in order to fully utilize PHP5's features.

CI has completely separate cores for PHP 4 and 5, so if you're using 5, you get the benefits of 5.

But I think still PHP4 is more widely available among hosts, no?

The Rails imitators always seem to be like Elvis impersonators: some are better than others, but none are ever quite as good as the original.

True but I think CI is evolving to be something else aside from being just another PHP rails clone. (Well that's what I'm trying to attempt with my forked version)

Being an MVC framework doesn't mean it's a rails clone, just that they have similarities.

And, I choose to use the PHP5 fork of CI, Kohana -- http://kohanaphp.com

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