A few questions about code igniter

[eluser]kertz[/eluser]
Hi
I'm new to CI and I've been using Symfony for a few months. I liked CI far more better from what I knew so far. But te problem is according to http://www.phpit.net/article/ten-differe...rameworks/ CI does not support ORM and has no authentication module.

I don't know now CI has or not? I wish to know if CI now provides this support. Also does CI alow the use of XML schema for databases which can be converted to SQL as Symfony does?

[eluser]Michael Wales[/eluser]
CI does not have ORM or an Authentication model built-in, but there are a lot of third-party libraries that provide these options.

Some searching around the forums will return quite a few options.

[eluser]kertz[/eluser]
if plugins are there then its fine... what about the XML Schema? Does CI support the use of XML schema for database design?

[eluser]xwero[/eluser]
I don't understand why not having a ORM solution would be a problem. ORM adds more weight to the page generating but like the authentication there are third party apps for it.

I don't think there isn't a xml to sql function but it wouldn't be to hard if you use the dbforge methods

[eluser]Michael Wales[/eluser]
Once again, no.

See, rather than the other frameworks that lock into their conventions, CodeIgniter allows you to come up with your own. If you wanted - sure you could write a small library that accepted an XML file to setup your database - you could even use Active Record and DBForge to make it work across all of the supported databases.

In reality, I'm not sure how much good it would do - without being implemented in a lot of other third-party libraries. CodeIgniter doesn't care what your database looks like - it doesn't need to know anything about it (other than server, username, and password of course). The most popular ORM libraries that have been released use reflection to provide the object mapping - thus, always returning an exact reflection of the database (not what an XML file says is going on).

Personally, I setup my initial database schema with good old phpMyAdmin.

[eluser]kertz[/eluser]
I would agree that its always good to keep things simple and thats what I liked in CI than Symfony, where thaty try to put so many features that it makes it hard to manage. But according to me its always good to have an XML to SQL conversion tool inbuilt since most of the time if you want to edit your db, it would be easy with the XML rather than SQL. Anyways the idea of frameworks is to make things simple...

[eluser]xwero[/eluser]
The problem with an xml file is that there is no standard doctype to go from xml to sql so the implementation is based on the developers idea of how the document has to look like. For instance i would go with attributes to store the metadata where other would choose to create tags for it.

[eluser]kertz[/eluser]
but CI could follow a standard and could put it in as an optional feature in the config. So that if someone wants to use it.. they can!

[eluser]xwero[/eluser]
That was the point i'm trying to make, there is no standard AFAIK. Even phpMyAdmin only allows you to import using docsql and sql.

I agree with you when you say a framework should make things easier for the developer but i also think a framework should be lean. A quote from Coolfactor, a CI veteran

I use 17 extended libraries to get CodeIgniter to work the way I want. Basically, I’m subclassing the entire framework with my own framework. Works great.

Developers here tend to use the jQuery javascript library which, in my opion, has the same idea: a solid base for all your extensions.

[eluser]kertz[/eluser]
ok... I'm at the moment thinking about which framework to choose... CI seems really good and simple. I checked out CakePHP also and I have experience with Symfony. Hmmm I need to think seriously about this now. Anyways I do not personally support the use of frameworks unless I want something quickly done(thats why framework is for anyway)... still I fear I may forget the core PHP!!! :O

In that case CI is good... only what you ned when you need... Hope I would join you guys soon...