Code Igniter in the Real World
February 21st, 2007
Code Igniter programmer, and good friend, James Nicol has written up a wonderful summary of his experience using Code Igniter in a production environment that he's called "Real world apps with CodeIgniter: part 1". His company developed a scheduling and logisitics management application for one of the candidates for the next US federal election (he isn't saying whom yet). His solution included building in table relationships, dynamic PDF generation, AJAX and javascript effects and CI used in a real-world app.
What is particularly nice about his summary (and the great news is that its only "part 1") is that he talks about the obstacles he encountered, the work he needed to produce, and his solutions. One of the limitations he encountered is the lack of CI's native table relationships - so to get around this he created a library to make that work. He wrote about his library on the forums once upon a time, but the response was surprisingly tepid. I think maybe we didn't have the same type of technical audience there at that time as we have now - perhaps seeing what it can do will spur a few more people to use it.
He decided to use DomPDF for PDF generation. That's the same library I went with for BambooInvoice. I was surprised to hear that he found the memory requirements of it pretty high. That said, I have had a few people report "bugs" in Bamboo when trying to generate PDFs. I never thought of it too much at the time, but it would make sense that they had their PHP memory limit set too low by their host. After doing some support for ExpressionEngine, I can affirm that crappy, budget, shared hosts almost always have this set to 6 to 8Meg, which seems exceedingly stingy. Heck, Apache even defaults to 8Meg so some hosts actually go out of their way to lower it, which seems asinine to me, but I guess those are the financial realities of budget hosts.
Anyhow, his part deux is coming shortly, and I for one am glued to my monitor until it "hits the stands". Thanks James for taking the time to write this up! If anyone else is using CI in a "real world" situation and you'd like to chat about it, please leave a comment below.
This entry was made on February 21st, 2007 @ 9:24 and filed into CodeIgniter, How-To, Noteworthy.
Yannick wrote on February 21st, 2007 @ 16:34
Thanks for the heads up on this series. I’ll be sure to keep tabs on it also.