Building PHP Applications with Symfony™, CakePHP, and Zend® Framework

Appendix B. CodeIgniter, Lithium, and Agavi with Code Examples

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Installing and configuring CodeIgniter, Lithium, and Agavi.

• Building a simple news app in each of these frameworks.

The PHP world does not begin, nor end, with Symfony, CakePHP, and Zend Framework. There is a multitude of other frameworks and some of them are useful, brilliant, and (most important) increasingly popular. In this appendix we will take a closer look at three of them: CodeIgniter (CI), Lithium, and Agavi.

The sample applications presented here will cover the first two of the create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) functionalities: creating and reading entries. We call them news publishing applications, but with a little modification they can be used for blogging, commenting, or as a guest book. That should give you enough sense of what each framework is up to.

We will use the two of the hosting environments presented in Chapter 2: Windows 7 64-bit with XAMPP 1.7.3; and Ubuntu Linux Desktop 10.04.1 64-bit with the standard Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (LAMP) environment. If you need help with setting them up, Chapter 2 covers that in detail.

CODEIGNITER

CodeIgniter had an explosion of popularity recently and if the trend continues, it will become the leading framework in 2011. So, what's so unique about it? It's incredibly nimble:

• Lightweight — Less than 2MB.

• Fast — No performance tweaks needed.

• Easy — Single configuration file, great documentation, no need to learn a templating language. ...