BambooINVOICE Built with CodeIgniter

BambooINVOICE is a simple open source invoicing web application built using CodeIgniter. The interesting thing is that you can download the code and see how a complete real-life web application is built with CodeIgniter as its framework.

Colorize Code

CodeIgniter offers a really cool and handy helper function called highlight_code(). It is a handy little function that allows you to pass it a string of text including HTML tags, PHP code ... etc and it returns a colorized version of that string highlighting the code and tags in distinct colors.

I wish I'd known abou this nifty function before when I was struggling with creating tutorial web pages that included HTML code and I longed find a way to highlight such code easily.

Word Inflection in CodeIgniter

I love the cool idea of providing inflection helper functions in CodeIgniter. They allow you to get the plural, singular, camel case ... etc of a word.

PHP Creator is Against Frameworks

Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP, strikes a high note against PHP frameworks. I live this article written by him because it takes a lot of the hype away from the insane number of PHP frameworks that are sprouting by and creating a lot of confusion for newbies to PHP.

His article shows how to build a web application designed on the MVC pattern without having to use one of the popular PHP frameworks. His message is essentially that you better evolve your own framework that is best suited to your own needs than spend your time trying to learn a ready-made framework that might turn out to be tough to tame for your needs as your web application grows.

At the end of his article The no-framework PHP MVC framework, Lerdorf concludes that:

Many frameworks may look very appealing at first glance because they seem to reduce web application development to a couple of trivial steps ..., but these same shortcuts are likely to be your bottlenecks as well since they achieve this simplicity by sacrificing flexibility and performance. ... Instead of starting by fixing the mistakes in some foreign framework and refactoring all the things that don't apply to your environment spend your time building a lean and reusable pattern that fits your requirements directly. In the end I think you will find that your homegrown small framework has saved you time and aggravation and you end up with a better product.

Instead of relying on a canned framework, Lerdrof applies "an MVC approach with clean and simple views and still have all the goodness of fancy Web 2.0 features" using the following technologies:

• PHP 5
• Yahoo! User Interface Library
• JSON

CodeIgniter

CodeIgniter is a simple yet powerful PHP framework. What I like about it is its simplicity. There are other more sophisticated PHP frameworks that might be more powerful and offer a more rich set of features, yet CodeIgniter wins when it comes to simplifying things in a pretty way. Its learning curve is also not as steep as other frameworks.

Seaside - A Smalltalk Framework

Although I do not do any Smalltalk myself yet I was interested in knowing about Seaside which, according to the official website, is "a framework for developing sophisticated web applications in Smalltalk."

What interested me most was that the developers of Seaside boldly stated that their framework is breaking with common accepted best practices in web development. Usually a new framework tries to use all sorts of buzz words and tell you it conforms with all widespread as well as new best practices, yet finding a framework that is bold enough to state upfront that it is breaking with common accepted best practices is something that would attract my attention. I'll try to learn more about Seaside, not in order to develop web applications with Smalltalk, but perhaps to learn some concepts on which that framework is build hopefully to carry them over to other languages which I do use.