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Keeping eye on competing frameworks
#1

I like to keep eye out for what's going on in web development scene, so been watching some Laravel stuff lately.

Recent talk from Laracon AU, it's about migrating to Laravel, but for some reason he's basing it exclusively on getting out of CodeIgniter project, so it was interesting to see how developers using other frameworks see CodeIgniter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_0Q5rXGHXg

Looks like he's main points why people should move away from quote "legacy framework like CodeIgniter" are:
- it doesn't support Composer
- it doesn't have templating engine
- it doesn't have any automated framework / backend / unit tests implemented
- it doesn't have any automated frontend / in-browser tests implemented, which Laravel has available via Laravel Dusk
- models implement SQL queries and doesn't use Eloquent, and that is making queries slower

Mind you, he's examples are all based CI 2.x, which obviously is older than 3.x, let alone new shiny 4.0.

From what I've seen most of these points will be made invalid by CI4 out of the box, minus probably only in-browser testing?
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#2

Good points! We'll have to make sure to get the message out there, once CI4 is ready for prime time Smile
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#3

They have always tried putting CodeIgniter down.

But 4.0 will make them change their minds.
What did you Try? What did you Get? What did you Expect?

Joined CodeIgniter Community 2009.  ( Skype: insitfx )
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#4

I agree that key for CI longevity lays in getting the right message out there.

It's a bit like PHP still gets stick for being not that good 10-15 years ago, making sure that it's vary clear how CI4 differs from CI3, but also, how it differs from Laravel.

While they have a lot of nice stuff built in, and plenty of both paid and free tools available, I believe that's where CI4 could excel for more sophisticated apps that need custom logic and setup. So it's almost like going for different markets.
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#5

I've been playing with Symfony 4 lately. Having worked a bit with Laravel, I really don't see much difference, but I'm not an expert with either framework. I'm not so enthusiastic about using Twig, but switching to the PHP templating makes me feel more at home. I might start a new project with Symfony 4 soon, just to say I did, I guess Tongue
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#6

@Pertti,

It is interesting that you posted this...just this week I was talking to a company who was using Phalcon and Laravel and I mentioned that I was a CI fan. I also mentioned that a lot of people were going to be surprised when CI 4.x comes out. The recruiter was surprised and excited to hear that CI was still active and alive. Looking forward to the CI 4.x Production release.
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#7

Not surprised they were surprised. I've been working on CI exclusively for last 10-11 years maybe. Because my current job it's one massive application running everything, and I'm the only dev here, it was very hard to even consider moving to anything else, but I have noticed that CI has dropped off from job ads. They request MVC experience, or Laravel explicitly.

I think going head to head with Laravel, trying to attract exact same market would be costly.

To me CI sounds like a tool for bigger apps that need loads of custom code and need to be fast processing requests, without all the nice to have clutter that other frameworks need to process. If someone can benchmark it and prove it beats Laravel or Symphony with raw power, that would be good selling point for "enterprise level" projects.

Said that, I have to say I do like the look of some developer specific tools that come out of the box for Laravel, that would make it easier to debug, monitor, etc, so there could be some room there for either official additional libraries or someone else to build free or premium products ontop of core CI4 that are specifically developer facing.
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