I spent most of Monday playing around with CodeIgniter (CI), a good PHP framework on my laptop. I really wanted to check it out after reading about CakePHP, Symfony, and other frameworks. CodeIgniter (CI) just seemed to make sense to me. It was simple to setup, and I was writing code pretty quickly due to that I am already familiar with PHP, and there are some good tutorials for CI.

My problem was that I kept comparing it to Ruby on Rails. On the CI website, one of the reasons to use CI is “You want a framework that does not require you to use the command line.” My problem was, I really like the command line. I am by no means afraid of the command line after years of DOS (IBM DOES, MS-DOS 3.3+) and Linux. In Rails there is a great command called “rake db:migrate”. With Rake you basically modify text files to create a table, add columns, delete tables, etc. Side note: Symfony does allow a command line, and CakePHP might too, but I don’t know.

CI does not deal with the command line. If you create tables in the database, you have to use either command-line SQL, or use some kind of GUI. Which of course slows things down. Not only that, you do not have a “rollback” feature that Rails does provide.

With all that said, if I need to write an application, and have to use PHP, I will use CI. Even though it is not Rails, it still does speed up the development time. I really recommend learning some kind of framework. I constantly have to work on applications I write 5 years ago, before web frameworks really existed, and know I would be saving time if it were based on any kind of framework.

See ya!