(07-28-2015, 12:54 AM)sv3tli0 Wrote: MS is good example but its not correct to compare Windows with CodeIgniter.
Its very different if its made for Clients and if its Developer Tool.
I am against compatibility layers because we don't need them at all.
Most of what I was discussing about Windows is relevant to development, probably in part because I developed software for Windows for 10 years before I became a web developer.
CI is a web framework, and, in that role, supplies many of the same features that an operating system supplies for traditional software developers.
At the top level, MS breaks down the Windows API into the following categories:
- Administration and Management (configuration, directory services, etc.)
- Diagnostics (debugging, logging, error handling, performance counters, etc.)
- Graphics and Multimedia (drawing, images, multimedia, OpenGL, etc.)
- Networking (settings, server APIs, network monitors, etc.)
- Security (Active Directory, Authentication, Authorization, Cryptography, Certificate Enrollment, and Security Management)
- System Services (I/O, File System, Device Management, Time, Registry, Memory Management, etc.)
- Windows User Interface (Strings, Menus, Dialog Boxes, Unicode, Hooks, etc.)
With some time, you could probably find everything that CI supplies for developers somewhere in the Windows API. The real difference is that the Windows API covers a lot more ground, and, amazingly enough, if you do some careful checking to make sure your arithmetic can survive the transition, you can recompile a 32 bit application written for Windows 95 to run as a 64 bit application in Windows 10, despite the fact that Windows 10 shares little more than this API with Windows 95 (because Windows 10 descended from NT, not 9x).
You may or may not remember this, but a little over a decade ago MS seemed ready to bet the farm on something they called the .Net Framework. They even planned to name their next version of Windows "Windows.Net" for a little while. 4+ versions later, they still haven't gotten rid of the lowly Windows API, and it's usually not that difficult to upgrade applications from one version of .Net to the next. It's even called a Framework, so it shouldn't be too difficult to find the equivalences between .Net and CI. There are even numerous ways to call Win32-based DLLs from .Net applications.
More importantly, I'm not looking for long-term support of my CI3 application. I'm looking for a path to transition my application from CI3 to CI4, much like I just finished transitioning from CI2 to CI3. I may have had to override a bunch of core classes, add some version-dependent functionality, and create some helpers to allow a smoother transition for deprecated features (or to back-port new features to help move the application code forward), but at least the number of code changes to get things up and running on the latest version of the framework was manageable. By the end of the year, I intend to strip out most of the CI2 compatibility in my application, then start leveraging CI3 and Composer to move forward.
I might be willing to rewrite a couple hundred controllers, 150+ models, and a couple dozen libraries, but if I have to start down that road with the knowledge that it's an all-or-nothing project, I'll go looking for a framework with a little more long-term stability.
