(11-14-2014, 04:02 PM)jg6075 Wrote: I think the reason I like CI and have stuck with is its simplicity: what you see is what you get. That, and it's stable and has maintained a consistent API. And a healthy dose of nostalgia, of course.
Laravel has a lot of great features, active community, and it has definitely revitalized the PHP community, but it wasn't for me. Laravel and its community is sort of indicative of a lot larger trends in the PHP community I don't personally care for. There's a lot of purist attitudes regarding 'true OOP' and playing Design Pattern bingo. To me, popular current frameworks like Laravel and Symfony represent an opposite extreme to the spaghettified PHP-4 style code (think Wordpress) that has given PHP a bad reputation. Instead of loose procedural code, there's this seemingly insane trend towards enterprise Java style overengineering and massive bloat in accomplishing relatively simple tasks. The other thing I'm not a fan of is the rewrite culture around these frameworks, how a lot of them don't seem averse to writing API-breaking changes frequently.
That's all well and good, since it's a matter of preference. But, I also see a lot of snarky comments directed at people who stick with frameworks like CI, as if they're a disgrace to the community. It doesn't make sense to me, since CI -- although not super elegant -- gets the job done without a ton of disgusting code. And that's what matters, right?
That being said, there's no reason CI shouldn't be supporting PHP > 5.3 features at this point, as that version is even approaching end of life (or has already, I forget). Granted, it's fairly easy to integrate things like Composer, namespaces, newer language constructs, etc. since CI is so open ended.
Basically, don't worry about what's "cool", since "cool" changes all the time in web dev. Focus on using something that's proven, stable, and fits your preferences/needs. For me, CodeIgniter does that.
That pretty much sums it up lol. I wish I had something to add, but that's pretty much how I feel about it lol.
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