Where have you been, CodeIgniter? // March 9th, 2007
For the past several months I have have been trying to use several different web application frameworks. None of them were a right fit for me for several reasons, either they lacked in documentation, were slow, required other software libraries, or were built in other languages that would take took long to learn.
For example, I tried Ruby on Rails for a majority of the time. I had the books, checked the blogs, installed it on my development server, but it just didn’t work out. The lack of sufficient documentation is the primary reason I jumped from the Ruby on Rails bandwagon. I also didn’t appreciate the “don’t worry about the magic behind Rails” because I need to know how things work to debug errors. And sure enough when errors came, I spent most of my free time searching for the answers. It doesn’t live up the hype, like most fads.
I decided it would be best to stick with PHP, a language I’ve used since 1999 and take a closer look at the PHP frameworks. This crop wasn’t much better than Rails, each one of them lacked in one or more areas; immature code and or configuration, lacking in documentation, or requiring annoying PEAR libraries. All this caused me to lose interests in these, if not all, frameworks.
It was time to put up or shut up and I went to the drawing board with plans on creating my own framework for my own projects. Less than 24 hours later, as luck would have it, I came across Code Igniter, a fast open source PHP web application framework with more than enough documentation and no need for any PEAR libraries. Installation is quick and simple with the configuration requiring more time, about 3 minutes.
I had been using CodeIgniter for several days, creating simple scripts to get a hang of the system. Then on Sunday night I decided to jump right in a create my first project, a fully functional administration web site for my sister’s jewelry business. Here it is late Thursday night and I am about 80% complete, and that is with me traveling to southern California Monday morning and returning Wednesday evening.
CodeIgniter is the framework I have been looking for since this time last year. It is fast, simple to use, elegant, well documented, stands on its own, open source, and powerful. Now all the projects I had to clear off the table because developing other ones would take too long are back on.
Instead of trying to get the USB adapter working, I did what I should have from the start, use some sort of network bridge to connect my machine to the wireless network. So, for about $58, I purchased and had shipped a 
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