People across all other PHP frameworks are opting for Laravel. Why?
With codeigniter (CI) dominating other PHP frameworks for quite sometime, It’s time that people start considering another PHP framework. After testing a few PHP frameworks, I chose Laravel as the alternative to codeigniter.
Why Laravel?
Laravel is built on PHP5.3 version, thus it provides many such features which codeigniter doesn’t. Although only a few years old, it is maturing fast. Expressive syntax and ORM capabilities are few of the great features of Laravel. Still not interested? Well, after reading this article, you’ll have 5 reasons to leave codeigniter.
- Built-in Authentication- One could not offer login option to users using Codeigniter language. You could only authenticate or authorize users using CI extensions. But, Laravel has a beautiful built-in authentication class. Using these extensible and customizable features, you can easily provide login option to your users. Moreover, one added benefit is that you can also protect your routes from the users with the help of filters.
- Modular Packaging System- In CI, There was no modular separation by default. You could not keep your code in separate modules, thus it was very cumbersome to reuse the same existing code. Laravel has a modular packaging system built in with the help of “bundles”. Bundles allow easy addition to the application, thus it becomes very easy to add/drop the code across applications.
- Creating Namespaces- Although codeigniter had no concept of namespaces in it, the problem could be avoided via usage of prefix or suffix class. But Laravel allows you to apply namespace to your code.Using namespace improves the autoload speed drastically. And lesser the response time, better the performance. Let us assume that there are 2 classes using “qwerty” library. The pointer would load the first class that it finds with the same name. So, applying the singleton approach the second class would automatically break. Laravel built-in PHP 5.3 version allows applying namespace to your code.
- Object-Relational Mapping- Codeigniter is stable enough to create small applications. One of the biggest feature that CI lacks is Object-Relational Mapping. It simply does not allow the concept of object inheritance. Therefore, either you could not have this feature or you had to rely on extensions. But, Laravel provides an excellent solution to this problem. It has powerful ORM features like Pivots, CRUDs etc. The eloquent ORM is user-friendly and easy to implement. Its super-fast mapping feature allows dealing with databases in a more efficient way.
- Unit-testing- Right now, there is no other PHP framework (except Laravel) that allows unit-testing the applications. Using Codeigniter, you can efficiently test the core, not the applications.
Does this mean Codeigniter is Dead? Are its days numbered?
Absolutely Not! First of all it is very well documented and is really easy to use even if you have no idea about MVC. Secondly, under the large active community, CI cannot die. It is still stable enough and is first choice among the newbies.
Now, the choice is yours! Either you can continue to work on codeigniter or you can choose to upgrade to Larevel. You even need not worry about your programmed codes in codeigniter because the migration process from CI to Laravel is quite easy and smooth.
A lot of developers are flooding towards the Laravel, you might also want to do the same if you are fed up with Codeigniter. Whatever you do, make sure that you get the expert opinion first.
So, are you going to use Laravel for your next project?
Leave Comments!
