Is CodeIgniter For Me ?

[eluser]Unknown[/eluser]
Hi,

I have a couple of questions if the CI community does not mind helping me with:

1) I normally program in procedural PHP 4/5 and am looking to start programming in an OOP method and also start using a framework, so why should I choose CI over zend, symfony or cakePHP ?

2) I am looking to build a large scale project based on a dating site similiar to Match and Dating direct and was wondering is CI can cope with the scalability of the project ?

3) Once the program has been completed using CI how do you upload it to your webhost package or do you just download CI and run the program straight in your hosting package ?

4) Is it easy to incorporate JQuery and also add style effects/templates to your project ?

I appreciate all your help and views.

Thanks

[eluser]n0xie[/eluser]
1. If you are used to procedural code, CodeIgniter is the best gateway (-drug) towards learning how to think from an Object Oriented Perspective since it has the lowest learning curve. I would highly discourage both Zend and Symfony if you are not well versed in OOP since both have a rather steep learning curve as is. This is not saying they are bad frameworks but in order to get full benefit of a lot of the 'magic' that happens within the framework, you need to have a thorough understanding of Object Oriented Paradigms. I would also rule out Cake since it has a lot of 'you have to do it this way' conventions. This is not a bad framework either, it just forces you to do things in a certain way (and this will usually speed up your development time), but this can get confusing if you are not familiar with OOP or Cake or the conventions generally associated with these types of frameworks.

It has been my believe that CI has found a great mix of offering a well structured core which tries to 'push' you into the OO direction, but at the same time, it doesn't force you follow OO patterns if you don't feel like it. An example would be that libraries and models are optional: you can write your whole application without ever having to use a model or a library.

2. CI is notoriously fast. It outperforms these 3 well known frameworks easily. A note on scaling though: scaling is a very specific job. In most cases, PHP won't be the bottleneck so one could argue that it doesn't really matter which framework you use. See also Rasmus Lerdorf at Digg about performance

3. Most serious programmers use some sort of automated deploy method. This could be via rsync, via some versioning system or via some deployment tool (Capistrano for instance). The quick and dirty way which everyone tries to avoid but does anyway is just upload everything via FTP. Much like 'editting on a live environment' everyone knows is wrong, yet most still do it anyway because it's easy.

4. Yes.

[eluser]mi6crazyheart[/eluser]
Of course not, CI community never mind for any type of suggestion, query or question. In fact, CI Community is a strong point of CI framework, because of which people get recommended to use it.

About your question number...
[1] Can't say a lot about this. Because, i've never used any other framework except CI
[2] Of course you can use CI from scalability point of view also.
[3] I think it depend upon u'r hosting service provider. Whether they've that kind of service or not. Here is one(http://www.getcloudigniter.com/). Hope this will solve u'r problem.
[4] As far as , using of JQuery/style sheet/templates concern, ya u can use all of them in CI also. That's absolutely not a big issue at all...

Hope this will clear some of u'r doubt.

[eluser]pbreit[/eluser]
CodeIgniter is likely a good option for you. I would also suggest avoiding Cake, Zend and Synfony for being overly complicated. Since you mention OOP and Jquery, I will suggest Yii which is more OOP than CI and has Jquery built-in.

[eluser]philm[/eluser]
ZEND is great... if you like pulling your hair out for 8 hours a day!