When I started motortopia.com about 10 weeks ago, I tried three frameworks: Symphony, PHPCake and CI. I gave them all about three solid days of testing, and ended up going with CI. Why? Mostly because I was on a time limit (like 8 weeks total) and CI was the one that was immediately understandable and usable out-of-the-box with what I already know: PHP. With Symphony and PHPCake there was a LOT of head scratching and question/answer cycles required in the chat rooms and forums to figure things out. CI was just plain understandable, fast, and flexible to do what I needed to do. CI certainly had issues that I had to deal with, but I was able to go right into the CI code and change them easily enough.
I’m sure Symphony and PHPCake are great frameworks, but CI was the one that made the most instant sense. And as you can see, kick-ass applications can be turned out of CI in a very short time, which was the bottom line for me.
I agree. I finally made the decision to begin using a framework for my project(s) a couple of days ago.. I looked into 18 different frameworks; installed and tried out at least 10 of them (including Cake)... From what I saw when researching them, CI had the smallest learning curv for me and the best feature-set for my needs, which declared it an instant winner in my book. I was able to start developing my application in CI within 10 minutes of downloading it and reading a little in the guide. So far, it has sped up my development and cleaned my code up tremendously!
But I also agree that you should use whatever framework you can learn the fastest, and works the best for your application. In my case, this was CI.
I’ve been using Fusebox4 (php version) for over 2 years and loved having an MVC framework to organize my code with. But as the size of my projects grew, the managability started getting out of hand. So I strted looking through the other frameworks out there. After trying Cake, Seagull, Symfony, and a slew of others it was that damn CI screencast that left me beaming hearts at the screen.
I downloaded CI and had a running admin section with a login in 30 minutes. I haven’t looked back. In 2 months I’ve already built 3 client projects on CI and have a big one in the works right now. Thanks Rick!
Going forward though I have one concern about performance in a heavy traffic environment. I have a social networking site I’m working on and I want to know how the base framework performs under pressure. To test it out, I’m building a linux cluster (thank you php/arch articles) with commodity P4 boxes to see how CI can stack up with a heavy load. I’m going to write a generic app with some load bearing functionality then hammer it with traffic. To allow for comparision, I’m also going set up the environment and write the same app in Symfony, Django and Rails. Project starts next week. This will take about 1 - 2 months to build and complete. I’ll post back with the results when we are completed. As you can imagine, I have high hopes for CI.
I’ve got a big list of tools but if you have a favorite OSS stress testing tool, please let me know.
I allso tried first cake, but didn’t get very far (didin’t get example to work and I tried, huh).
One thing I miss from cake is output buffering, so i could example filter something like ä:s to entities ... but well why don’t I just buffer my output or maeby wrote a helper myself…
I’m new to CI and previously used CakePHP for a small project. I found the CI documentation extremely well written and easier to follow than the CakePHP manual. It made it much easier to get started. At the moment, CakePHP does appear to have a larger community base with many third-party resources (blogs, articles, etc.). Also, if you have Rails experience, you may initially prefer CakePHP, due to its very Rails-like approach in conventions and functionality.
Before making your decision, I would recommend watching Derek’s new CI screencast as he does an excellent job demonstrating the use of models and client-side scripting in CI.
This function i wrote to my text_helper.php, wasn’t so difficult to do and works for now.
My encoding in www-page is UTF-8 and from database comes UTF-8, but sometimes I write something skandinavic by hand with ä‘s and ö‘s.
Thanks for php.net. Maeby somebody can do it better…
Hi. guys!
Cake is better than CI due to several reasons.
First of all, Cake has SVN repository (i can download latest sources).
Also, CakePHP has great, so I can easily add bug reports or feature requests
CakePHP divides helpers into Components (parts of code, that used in controllers) and Helpers (functions to be used in views). Also, every component / helper is an object.
It is much more flexible, than simple functions in CI.
And so on..
Sure… if you can get past the initial learning curve before you give up and start looking at porn instead. There are lots of great frameworks out there, but I picked CI because I was able to start building things with it almost immediately. Different tools for different jobs, none are really better than the other unless you are talking about a specific application.
Cakephp framework is better in many ways, I use both cakephp and CI. I someteimes rather use CI for smaller projects and when the projects needs speed, cakephp is slower but has better helper functions and is more MVC oriented than CI. I hope in the near future CI can implement some features I really like on cakephp. For instance I really don’t like CI’s forms and I’ve built my own class for this. I hope tou can change this really soon.
I tried a few frameworks (Syphony,Cake,WACT,CI,WASP and some others ...) , but finally settled for CI mainly becuse -
Speed( CI is fastest ) , Size (CI is smallest ) and Simplicity ( Almost no learning surve ). Also php4 complaiant.
CakePHP is ok but there is a learning curve. As im writing a open source CMS i would like users to be able to devlop plugins easily and not run around learning a framework ... with CI u are running as soon as u read the manual which takes 5 minutes at most.
I don’t believe its as easy as asking which is a “better framework”. It all depends on the developer and their needs.
One of my initial thoughts was that CI was too simple and thus not powerful. I also figured it would require more work to get something done. The “simplicity” of it is what makes it shine though. I actually wouldn’t call it “simple” now, I would say it is designed to be light weight, managable and logical. I was able to have it installed and actually writing code that worked within an hour. Spending more time on tutorials, the wiki and message board had me feeling confident in using it within the day. Due to the “simplicity” of how CI is designed I feel secure in implementing third party routines/modules/classes when or if they are needed. Considering that in most other frameworks made me feel like it would be a hack to use outside classes.
As for Cake, if I wasn’t using CI I would be using it. Although I’m not a fan of the PEAR libraries I do acknowlege the huge assortment they have. I found Cake was decent for getting up and running and it was quite useable for me. The footprint did feel a bit large and it lacked the precise clarity of CI. At any rate, I think Cake is a very good framework and it has a strong community to back it up.
From what I’ve seen of the CI people I think the community and userbase will grow very quickly around here. Specially with the regular updates and additions.
Actually the principles of CAKE and CI are quite similar. Even though CAKE has a more advanced model and supports DB relations. Also CAKEs bake script is really nice, cause it automates things quite a bit. The way CI handles active records is a bit less advanced in my opinion. On the other hand CAKE forces you to do things in a certain way. Which might be good or bad thing depending on what you prefer.
CI is known for its lightweight and the excellent manual. When I first started I thought CI was very simple and CAKE was totally complex. Cake isn’t that complex actually. Just the manual is not as clear.
If you need AJAX, automated stuff, DB relations, integrated ACL maybe go for CAKE. If you are looking for lightweight, speed and a very good manual go for CI.
I just have a better feeling using CI, cause it seems very simple and good structured to me. On the other hand sometimes I miss some of Cake features.
Rick was talking about integrating DB relations into CI in the future though. So the feature list will come close to CAKE in the future.
Both are excellent framworks in my opinion and both have great communties. If you prefer fancy stuff go with CAKE if you prefer simplicity go with CI. Or use them both
i was looking for a simple but also powerful framework
i spent 5 or more days with testing frameworks… (lol! guess i tested half of list -> http://www.coldscripts.com/PHP/Scripts/Programming/Framework)
and.. i should say that CI is the most understanable one :thumbsup:
I’ve been looking at a way of writing PHP faster.
I’m a huge fan of RoR and stumbled accross CI.
For now it suits my needs, I looked at the Cake website and blog tutorial and found CI a lot more appealing and understandable.
But as said before in this topic. It’s what you need to finish the job.
I needed something fast, project is due in 5 weeks, so CI filled in that requirement.
Maybe I’ll try Cake for my next project and compare them.
I’ll be back with this to tell you about my experiences.
They’re probably both good Frameworks, and you’ll have to choose that one suiting your needs.
CI solved mine for this project.
I’m going to start playing with CI tonight, after a few days of messing with Cake. Basically, I couldn’t stand the data validation system in Cake, was way to limiting for me. Not to mention most of my custom validation was needing to go in the controller, when the “cake way” seems to be to do it in the model. Was just too confusing. Looking at CI, it appears to be a little more flexible, and definitely the data validation system looks much more robust. Not to mention some of the other classes I see ready made, like the image class. Can’t wait til I get off work so I can jump in and get my feet wet.. or burnt I guess judging by the framework name
