Faisal Ahmed

Most web application developer who are involved in PHP based development must be aware of CodeIgniter framework. It is a hugely popular framework, specially amongst developers who are just starting out on MVC pattern based development. But with introduction of more recent frameworks such as Laravel and Symfony, there seems to be a downward trend in the popularity of the CodeIgniter framework. Some developers have even started to call it obsolete.

In this post I would like to given an alternative perspective on this discussion. Being a freelance web application developer I have to work with many kind of clients. In my client base, most cases clients are non technical individuals who feels reassured when they see something working on their web browser. For client like these who normally have small to moderate scale projects I often still use CodeIgniter framework because it gives me ability to generate rapid outputs without much upfront configuration. Having said that that does not mean as a developer you have to forgo useful tools such as ORM or better authentication libraries. I think with the use of composer package manager which is not supported in CodeIgniter we can bring in libraries that can extend the feature of this framework. For example, recently I have been working on Laravel framework mostly but had to move back into CodeIgniter framework for a small scale project. The one thing that stuck out for me was an ORM library which save a lot of time. So, I ended up using propel ORM in CodeIgniter for that project. My point in this is that we don’t have to abandon a framework just it uses older software development architecture. Not every application has to be scaled, for applications like those CodeIgniter is still a great framework. We just have to extend it with the library which we need for any particular project. One bonus of using CodeIgniter has also been hassle free transition from development to live, specially on shared hosting environments.

Hope, I was able to get the point across and helped you see a different utility of this framework for rapid development, specially the small applications which does not need to be scaled. So, in the end I do not feel that CodeIgniter framework is obsolete yet, but it’s role may have changed 🙂