Integrating CI with non-CI resources

[eluser]tim042829[/eluser]
I've been a web programmer for 14 years. I've developed web resources from the ground up in
C,C++,rebol and newlisp and built web resources in python on top of a minimalistic set of resources.
My business partner and collaborator in many projects is primarily a perl programmer.

Because of the wide user base of php in general and CI in particular, I expect to find much of
what I have done in my own code base to be replicated in PHP in general and CI in particular.
Additionally, I am researching drupal.

However, I still need to ask the two following general questions and also a more specific question:
As for the two general:
<b>1)Is it possible to integrate CI with drupal?</b>
<b>2)What are the possibilities of integrating python modules with CI?</b>

On to the more specific:
One of the strategies that my partner and I have used to integrate our separate code bases is by
exchanging data (example: session state) via either text files holding json data structures or
by mySQL tables, either storage keyed by a session ID.
As I start to learn CI, I might want to consider my options in session handling based on the
narrative above.
<b>3)What session handling options (if any) should I consider?</b>

Any and all thoughtful comments or links to relevant discussions are welcome.

[eluser]danmontgomery[/eluser]
1) There is a Drupal bridge for CakePHP (http://drupal.org/project/drake), but there isn't one for CI that I'm aware of. You could pretty easily run CI and Drupal side-by-side (in the same way codeigniter and wordpress can run side-by-side), but running codeigniter apps inside of drupal may take some fiddling.

2) I'm not a python dev so I can't really speak on this one... Intuition tells me that you could run a python module as a script with exec() or any similar function, but I'm not sure that's what you're trying to accomplish here.

3) Codeigniter's session library, by default, uses cookies and not PHP's native $_SESSION functionality. With the flip of a configuration option (and a DB table created), this is switched to storing all session information in the database, with a cookie serving only as a session identifier. In my opinion, this is the best option, if you are alright with the additional overhead (you can enable the output profiler to see any queries this produces). There's also a native session library that was created for CI 1.5x (http://codeigniter.com/wiki/Native_session/), which I will give you back PHP's native session functionality, if that's the road you want to go down.

[eluser]tim042829[/eluser]
on 1) Understood.
on 2) To clarify, the python scripts would be (for the most part) as URLs.
on 3) That is good to hear, because using a cookie to store a session ID
for a DB record is a strategy that we are used to.

Thanks for the explanations.
cheers :coolsmile:
tim