Start up Web 2.0

This week I took delivery of a new laptop a macbook my first mac and I am enjoying using it immensely. As I use CodeIgniter frequently and have been waiting to use Textmate for quite sometime I searched the CI forums and googled for a CodeIgniter bundle without finding a complete bundle.

NickC from the CI forums has started a bundle but it didn’t contain the full classes for CodeIgniter. The original release from Nick was in April 2006 over a year ago so I’m sure some of you will be using this to help your coding.

I continued using the initial bundle from Nick and added the whole classes API which can be easily added. This is the first release but is version 0.2 as 0.1 was Nick’s original release.

• Benchmarking Class - cibench
• Calendaring Class - cical
• Config Class - ciconfig
• Database Class - cidb & ciar (active record)
• Email Class - ciemail
• Encryption Class - ciencrypt
• File Uploading Class - ciupload
• FTP Class - ciftp
• HTML Table Class - cihtml
• Image Manipulation Class - ciimage
• Input and Security Class - ciinput
• Loader Class - ciload
• Language Class - cilang
• Output Class - cioutput
• Pagination Class - cipag
• Session Class - cissession
• Trackback Class - citrack
• Template Parser Class - citemp
• Unit Testing Class - ciunit
• URI Class - ciuri
• User Agent Class - ciagent
• Validation Class - civalid
• XML-RPC Class - cixmlrpc
• Zip Encoding Class - cizip

As this is the first release please email me at luci3n(at)sellersrank.com about problems with the download, or omissions or errors. or just leave a comment here.

To download the bundle go to the CodeIgniter Textmate Bundle download page

CodeIgniter has spawned a fork called KohanaPHP (the forums can be found at KohanaPHP forums), it is in the initial stages of formation an initial release ready for download. Originally created under the project title BlueFlame, KohanaPHP’s first release is mainly some bug fixes for the well known PHP MVC Framework. KohanaPHP is a more community driven framework than CodeIgniter as EllisLab manage the development of CodeIgniter.

The fork was announced initially on the CodeIgniter forums but was not well received by EllisLab for the nature of their announcement and a argument quickly ensued which resulted in a number of posts being deleted and the thread closed as tempers flared and insults were thrown. The main points that EllisLab were aggrieved at where the use of their resources to promote, some copyright issues regarding the documentation and also the manner the fork was announced without any contact to the EllisLab team.

So what was the main reason of the fork?
The principle reason was that the lack of feedback and bug fixing that was present and the time between bugs being identified and an official release incorporating these fixes. Also the amount of influence the community had on further development of the framework. As EllisLab are sole developers of the framework they control the development, this has frustrated a number of developers who want to be able influence the design process and contribute code.

As EllisLab develop another commercial PHP framework ExpressionEngine their time has been spent in further development of this CodeIgniter has been neglected of late, especially with regarding bug fixes.

What does KohanaPHP have to offer that CodeIgniter doesn’t ?
At the moment there isn’t much difference as this is very much early days. KohanaPHP has officially released version 1.0 and has fixed the bugs identified by the CodeIgniter community with the unofficial fixes.  KohanaPHP will be community driven so developers frustrated with development cycles can get involved.

What does this fork effect CodeIgniter and their community?
Well that depends on a number of things but Rick Ellis (CodeIgniter Author) addressed the problems behind the slow release cycle and bug fixing. In summary Rick states that CodeIgniter has been created based on a large portion of ExpressionEngine and the strain in maintaining two separate has put on his small development team so to alleviate this ExpressionEngine 2.0 which is currently under development will be using the CodeIgniter libraries which will help make development more efficient and will enable EllisLab to more rapidly maintain the code and also develop new features, so as ExpressionEngineis developed so is CodeIgniter.

This is good news for CodeIgniter as this will enable a increased development release cycle and will also be good for EllisLab in that they will also benefit from bug identification and fixes from the CodeIgniter community and vice versa. The only negative slant on this that CodeIgniter will continually to not be a community driven project.

KohanaPHP on the other-hand will be completely driven by the community as a number of the more active contributors to the forum will be helping drive KohanaPHP rather than contributing to the CodeIgniter community.

Is KohanaPHP compatible with CodeIgniter?
At present both frameworks are compatible and in the short term KohanaPHP will be maintaining backwards compatibility with CodeIgniter. As both frameworks develop on different paths it will be interesting to see the where they go and what are the benefits of each.

What are the new proposed features to be added for KohanaPHP?
KohanaPHP has announced the new features that are going to be in KohanaPHP 1.1.

• ORM Active Record Models
• Cascading resource loading
• Reintroduce optional init files for libraries
• Greatly improve the validation library
• Replace session library with one more powerful and flexible

What are the new proposed features to be added for CodeIgniter?

EllisLab are far less open about the new features that will be added to CodeIgniter in the future but Rick Ellis has stated that the database support will be improved.

So what does it mean to developers like you and me?
At present there is no real choice to make as KohanaPHP has not added any new functionality or drifted from CodeIgniter compatibility. But it remains to be seen how it develops and if it becomes a real rival to CodeIgniter.

Any review of PHP editors for Ubuntu without including GEdit is incomplete, the default text editor for the Gnome desktop in Ubuntu at first is very bare but with the installation of the the plug-ins provides a good editor that may lack some features but for sheer raw speed has few equals.

Standard Plugins

• Bracket Completion: Automatically create the closing bracket once one is inserted.
• Character Map: Insert easily all those special characters.
• File Browser Pane: Display the file structure in a handy side pane.
• Indent Lines: Easy indent or unindent lines.
• Modelines: Emacs, Kate and Vim-style modelines support for gedit.
• Smart Spaces: Forget you’re not using tabulations.
• Snippets: Insert common code fragments with a couple of key strokes.
• Tag list: Provides a method to easily insert into a document commonly used tags/strings without having to type them.

Non Standard Plugins

• Class Browser: This is an essential plugin for easy navigating classes listing the functions in the side panel. Uses ctags (exuberant-ctags) which need to be installed via synaptic or sudo apt-get install exuberant-ctags.

So as you can see from the list of plugins above GEdit is not a typical editor there are some features that it lacks such as auto-completion and code folding. Although these are not present it does have some features that are not present in some of the editors reviewed such as snippets these make coding much easier and more productive (Update Jun 2 2007)but unlike Komodo Edit 4.1 these are via key strokes and are very handy. As Jeff Griffiths and Troy Topnik both from Active State have kindly pointed out these are available in Komodo Edit using the triggers.

Over all this is an excellent editor its lightweight nature is very easy to use and if some more plugins were created for code folding and auto-completion would prove more useful.

Other Reviews

• gPHPEdit
• Scribes
• Komodo Edit 4.0