CodeIgniter : A recommendation for PHP Programmer

I was thinking to publish this post way before but between my irregularity and busy schedule I couldn’t do that. Today, I would like to tell you that Why I choose CodeIgniter for my current project and recommend it for other programmers? I’ve used CakePHP for my one previous project in which I’ve used the version 1.1.7 of Cake. I must admit that CakePHP is a great MVC framework with but there are many performance issues in the related to CakePHP and I decided not to use it until the final version of 1.2.0 of CakePHP which is still in RC phase while writing this post.

Why I recommend PHP Programmers to use CodeIgniter?

Yes I’ve decided to use it along with this I’ve asked my programmer friends out there in office to use it. You’re wondering why I choose CodeIgniter rather than using Zend Framework, which add more values in PHP programmer’s career.Let’ me answer them all in the reasons below.

1. The main issue which I got attracted with CodeIgniter is its performance. CodeIgniter is faster than other popular PHP MVC frameworks. Take a look at these Benchmark test done by Rasmus Lerdorf(creator of PHP programming), here , here in here. And also take a look at another benchmark test . So it’s clear that CI is faster than other Framework. Rasmus also told that he liked CodeIgniter because it is faster, lighter and the least like a framework.
2. Another main reason behind recommendation, it has very low learning curve. CodeIgniter Downloads come with a tremendous user guide which is a great documentation like PHP Manual to begin with. And from my personal experience, CodeIgniter has very low learning curve compared to CakePHP and Zend Framework. If you’re a beginner for PHP frameworks then I recommend to go with CodeIgniter at begining.
3. The coding conventions are flexible and simple. Ironically, CakePHP has very strict coding conventions so you must be very careful about cases of characters while coding.
4. Why not Zend Framework and why CodeIgniter? Ok, one question goes here what is so good about Zend Framwork ? Eventual answer is ZF contain huge set of libraries and classes compared to any other framework. OK I agree, but another great news is that You can use Zend Framework’s classes in the CodeIgniter using hooks in CI. So you can use huge amount of Zend’s libraried in CI as well.

These are the main reason why I recommend for using CodeIgniter for PHP programmers.But I still believe that I’ll be using CakePHP for once I get final version of 1.2.0 because I still believe that it is robust, has a great design patters and great tool for group development .

If you recommend any other PHP framework, please let us know why you recomment that framework.