I like your work on CI but some inaccuracies here:

1. Well, sure ExpressionEngine may have been released in 2001, according to you, but in that iteration it was NOTHING like today’s CodeIgniter. CodeIgniter is a blatant copy of Ruby on Rails (not saying that is a bad thing) which came out much later than 2001. CI is much newer than RoR and borrowed, wholesale, many of its concepts and even directory structure. CI also borrowed heavily from CakePHP which pre-dates CI.

2. Of course CI uses PEAR, at least some of its principles, if not exact code. PEAR does pre-date the modern version of CI. CI, even though you say it was from EE in 2001, is really much newer. And it does use PEAR ideas and code fragments. Period. EE in 2001 was nothing like it is now. Code totally different – not much like RoR at all at that point.

Basically, acting like the 2001 version of EE really has something to do with modern CI (or even modern EE) is not really true.

Again, CI is awesome and you are awesome too, just wanted to clarify the record here. Please make more CI screencasts by the way.

As regards CodeIgniter with PHP4 and/or PHP5 I have to say that CodeIgniter was noticeable in its absence from the GoPHP5 website – why didn’t CodeIgniter that initiative to influence a better adoption of PHP5, rather than simply put up with the status quo. Quite a number of Irish hosting companies have since then shifted over to supporting PHP 5 and
taking that as a sample I’d take it as a success.

Do you agree with me though that the Zend Framework is also, if not even more so, monolithic that PEAR? All it would take for the CodeIgniter homepage/manual to seem more balanced would be to also refer to ZF – at least then all I would have been able to complain about was the apparent NIH which you graciously pointed out didn’t happen.

Great review. I did one of the same book on my blog, and was a reviewer of the book before it got published (not for spelling/content, just for glaring omissions or mistakes in the CI code). I also am a dev for CodeIgniter, and just wanted to comment a bit on your post.

Regarding PEAR, we like PEAR. Those guys/gals do generally great work. I’m a fan and supporter of their goals. This is really just a matter of history. While its true that CodeIgniter itself wasn’t released until 2006, the codebase is taken (almost wholesale) from our commercial CMS ExpressionEngine. ExpressionEngine was first released in 2001, and the code in it was around long before then. This obviously pre-dates PEAR. I’m not sure honestly why it was chosen as an example, I suspect due to the instant recognition of the project, but I can say that the homepage mention was a copy/paste job from the manual page you cite. Really, it was only mentioned once – and again, only as an example.

Even if PEAR was available, the licensing concerns (as mentioned) are major hurdles, as our commercial product would not likely be compatible with it. CodeIgniter itself would be, but we are using CI to build EE now, and thus need to be able to distribute the codebase under our own proprietary license.

So that example aside, do you still fee we suffer from NIH?

With respect to PHP 4 vs 5 – I do want to say that CI has separate base files for 4 and 5. We take advantage of PHP5 as much as we reasonably can, and fall back to 4 when we need to for more widespread support. The truth is that I don’t like that I have to support PHP 4, but it is still the dominate PHP version out there, philosophical arguments aside, and we need EE (and therefore CI) to be installable on as many servers as possible. We have every intention of dropping PHP4 support when the market will bear it, but that isn’t today. That said, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in CI that prevents you from using PHP 5 exclusively, and I do that on my own opensource project, BambooInvoice.

I liken it to supporting Internet Explorer. It may be obsolete, and broken, and I hate it, but there is still a sizable enough group using it that I need to account for them on my site. I notice that you have IE hacks in your own stylesheet

Thanks for the well written review, and I hope to change your mind a bit on some of the points you raise.

Awesome.

OK, got that out of the way – truth is I hadn’t considered the licensing issue. Just to clarify, PEAR isn’t a license by the way – developers get a shortlist of licenses to choose from [the PHP, Apache, LGPL, BSD style and MIT licenses]. But yes, I can see why somebody might want similar or same code under a different license.
This is one reason why mysql is dual licensed, I guess – businesses that distribute mysql with their products get to choose a more business/oem friendly license with their wallet, so I can see why some other businesses decide to write their own – either they can’t afford the license fees or they eschew the possibilities of asking the copyright owner to dual-license the software.

I hadn’t thought of asking why PEAR was the only library being referred to, to be honest. Hadn’t thought of laziness to mention another library in an effort to seem balanced!

Eh, maybe, maybe not. It might not have been a good candidate for any number of reasons: licensing issues, for example. I’m speculating, but the current version of CI is based mostly off of work done in ExpressionEngine, which has a very different, much more restrictive license than PEAR.

But a more basic question: does everyone who writes a library similar to an existing PEAR library suffer from NIH syndrome? Do Solar, ZFW, EZComponents, CakePHP, Symfony, PRADO, and Seagull all suffer from NIH? Maybe some do, and maybe some don’t, but I don’t think we can make those conclusions quite so easily.

“As regards my impression of PEAR being singled out? Well, that’s my opinion based on the repeated text…”

Yes, but perhaps it was just used as an example because it’s *by far* the most well-known? I suppose it’s been singled out in a technical sense, but I don’t see any reason to take it as derisive.

In the end, I suppose I just wish you’d *ask* why, rather than assume malicious intent. Derek Allard would be a good guy to start with, and he’s quite good at responding to emails.

The first public version of CodeIgniter was made available, according to wikipedia (couldn’t find this information on the CodeIgniter site), in 2006.

Let me do the maths for you: that’s 4 years lead-time of those pear packages already being available for use.

Now any reasonable person would surely use preexisting packages, especially if they are open source and submit bug fixes or bug reports, rather than expend resources reinventing them.

Go figure.

As regards my impression of PEAR being singled out? Well, that’s my opinion based on the repeated text:
“You are not interested in large-scale monolithic libraries like PEAR.”

There’s no other large-scale monolithic library mentioned, such as the Zend Framework, so I think it’s fair to say that it has been singled out.

That’s an incorrect assumption. Stating that CI is an alternative for people who don’t want to use PEAR is *not* an attack, and should not be taken at anything more than face value.

CI makes certain design decisions intentionally, and one of those is to make it *easier* to work with other code libraries than similar MVC frameworks like Symfony and CakePHP. I think your claims of “NIH” are pretty off-base.