Somewhere last year (April-May 2007), I started my journey into Web 2.0 . I have a lovely mentor Aik-Siong Koh, who not only inspired me to start learning Smalltalk(Squeak) but also taught me. More of it in another post 🙂
We then started our experimentation with Seaside, which is a brilliant framework built on top of Smalltalk, which can be used for Development of Dynamic and Complex Web apps. Using Seaside, we developed Caartz, which is a free online shopping list manager. More of it in another post again 🙂
After successful deployment of Caartz, I had to look out for other open source technologies as Seaside didn’t have much or any user base in India. I wanted to go in for either PHP or Ruby on Rails (read as Hot Cake). A good friend asked me to help him in customizing WordPress themes for bakarbakar, tphitp and also to develop Fastrevise, for this reason I started of with basic PHP and have plans for Ruby on Rails sometime during next 6 months.
My hunt for a php framework started when I had to develop a php website numberkyahai and it was to be hosted on a server which had PHP version 4. Most of the frameworks such as Zend, Symfony needed PHP version 5. Finally I settled down for CodeIgniter, whose website attracted me to such an extent that I didn’t look out for any other framework.
CodeIgniter was developed by Ellis Rick of EllisLab, who is a rock-band member. The reason for his development was
- Most of the frameworks worked only on php 5.
- Most of the frameworks had outdated or dispersed documentaion.
- Those available documentation assumed that the reader was either a decent or expert php developer and hence novice or amateur php developer would find it difficult to learn a framework.
Probably I will post more about CodeIgniter sometime later. But for people who are looking to start learning PHP or even for the Expert php developers, CodeIgniter is a very good framework worth a try and I assure that you would definitely not regret it. It has got very good and updated User Guide and a couple of Video Tutorials which will guide you through Basic MVC architecture, installation and setup of CodeIgniter and also a Basic Example to get you started.
Shall be posting more on CodeIgniter soon on the following topics
- Using CodeIgniter to develop a creative badge/ widget using WidgetBox
- Using CodeIgniter to develop a creative badge/ widget using Clearspring
- Using CodeIgniter and Google Maps API to develop a User Driven Map related website.
- Using CodeIgniter and JavaScript libraries etc