Kevin started by introducing himself – he’s a developer for GoSpoken, an organiser for BarCamp London and he’s Welsh. He accidentally got into PHP whilst studying business and is talking to us about codeigniter.

Codeigniter’s a open source but commercially supported application framework that runs on PHP4. It’s very lightweight and fast, with extensibility even to include Zend classes. He also mentions the active community and thorough documentation, bringing up some clear and focussed API reference documentation to demonstrate the point.

Now it’s time to write some code. Kevin’s going to put together a Hello-World type application to demonstrate codeigniter in action. he walks through the convention-over-configuration application layout, showing how the software adopts of the MVC pattern and the language support.

He shows a simple controller class and mentions that the framework supports URL rewriting. The traditional configuration dependencies of database connection data and the like and managed as well as less obvious configuration like security keys, cookie settings and the like.

He shows a pagination setup, demonstrates database access and shows what errors look like from the user’s point of view.

We go into questions.

Codeigniter is more lightweight in data access than, say CakePHP – which could be a pro or a con dependent on what you’re trying to do.

The code-generation facilities that come with Rails (rake) and Cake (bake) aren’t present in this framework. Richard Allesbrook, an experienced PHP developer who recently presented an introduction to CakePHP at GeekUp Sheffield, noted that such code generation facilities can become less useful as the developer becomes more experienced.

Finally, Kevin thinks that codeigniter is suited to small lightweight applications that need to be fast.

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