Now I’ve tried out Ruby on Rails before, and I didn’t really like it. It did too much for me, and in the end, I didn’t know how it worked so I couldn’t modify it (I think I tried out that blog tutorial). After that, I just stayed away from frameworks, assuming they were all like that. But recently, I came across CodeIgniter. After watching a videotutorial, I thought it’d be nice to try out. It seemed pretty simple, and I understood what was going on. But my research didn’t stop there. I looked at other PHP frameworks, particularly CakePHP.

Snook wrote up a nice comparison of CodeIgniter and CakePHP. In the end, he chose CakePHP because it did do a lot of things for him. I know I didn’t want that. After reading the comments to that article I found out that the CakePHP documentation isn’t that great, while CodeIgniter’s is organized and easy to use. There was a nice comment that said something like, “What good does saving 10 minutes of coding do when you have to spend 30 minutes trying to figure out how to use it?” CodeIgniter also appears to be light and faster. Another big reason I didn’t choose CakePHP is because it includes Prototype and Script.aculo.us, and everyone knows I like me some good ol’ Mootools lovin’. I’d rather use a framework that doesn’t force me to use a bloated javascript library.

I also discovered that the development cycle of CodeIgniter wasn’t that quick (so bugs didn’t get fixed quickly), but the developers, EllisLab, have decided to merge its development with another commercial framework they produce, ExpressionEngine. I’m not sure if the issue has been solve, but it would appear so.

I know there are other frameworks out there, but my choice for now is CodeIgniter. I’m going to try to make a web app with it soon. Let me know what framework you use! I just might try it out (if there’s a videotutorial).

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 29th, 2007 at 11:27 am and is filed under web development and tagged with cakephp, codeigniter, framework, php. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.