When to use CodeIgniter 4?
I will give you my reasons for when I consider it interesting to use Codeigniter to develop your applications.
Here is a point that I consider very interesting to discuss, which is when to use CodeIgniter. If we compare it with other PHP frameworks, that is, the same environment as Laravel, I think it has absolutely nothing to do with it. Let's be clear. For example, if you want to create a Rest API to connect it to another application, obviously Laravel will give you many more options, for example, for the authentication part, the management part via SPA or directly through tokens, CodeIgniter also has its thing. But obviously Laravel has many more features, with this, the integration is much easier, cleaner and therefore more maintainable, that is, everything is excellent, apart from the fact that you also have another huge ecosystem to use, and in this case, CodeIgniter pales enormously.
You might wonder what this type of framework is for. Another very important point in this is that the update curve that we have in frameworks such as C4 is not as high as the one we have in Laravel, where we have updates practically daily or weekly with new features and bug fixes. CodeIgniter has a much slower update curve, which are mostly bug fixes and not so much adding features. However, this scenario can be excellent for certain audiences, that is to say.
Not all people are programmers who want to be constantly receiving that huge flow of updates that we have in Laravel if they don't want something more stable, and in that type of case, CodeIgniter can be an excellent option, once again, I think it can be adapted to a certain type of audience in which they want to develop their simple web applications such as blogs, online stores. Note that you could still grow this quite a bit with projects like CodeIgniter, but you don't want to be tied to that update curve that sometimes even becomes a rather complex curve, which is what we have in Laravel. I'll look at it a little bit so that my point can be understood a little better.
When you compare what is a casual gamer, that is to say, one who plays very occasionally, plays half an hour a day, plays a couple of hours a week or something like that, to what is an enthusiastic gamer who plays at least 3 to 5 hours a day, it is exactly that type of public or the example that I want to give you, Laravel is or you can compare it or enter the channel of enthusiastic gamers who play several hours a day while CodeIgniter is the other type of player who simply wants to be playing a few hours a week, you understand, a week or a few minutes a day, which is completely fine because again, not everyone wants to be tied down or wants to keep up with the huge updates that Laravel offers us, if they don't want something a little more stable that they know will work in practically any php environment in which you want to place it, which we can't say about Laravel. So if you are this type of public, CodeIgniter can be an excellent option for you and around here.
Remember that I have a huge amount of material for both CodeIgniter and Arabel, both free and paid, including courses and books, which you can see on the desarrollolibre.net page.
- Andrés Cruz
Develop with Laravel, Django, Flask, CodeIgniter, HTML5, CSS3, MySQL, JavaScript, Vue, Android, iOS, Flutter