Today’s fast paced world has creep into every aspect of our lives including web application development. Deadlines are tight, budgets are small, and everything has to work the first time. Most experienced web application developers usually either windup writing their own toolkit or at the least make use of a toolkit already written and maintained by someone else. When it comes to PHP and AJAX, in my opinion anyway, it is easier to use the already abundant tool kits, frameworks and alike, than to maintain your own. Using currently developed frameworks you can leverage the knowledge of the open source community to help you do your work by allowing them to keep up with security vulnerabilities, bugs, and new technologies as they become available.
I personal have used a few different frameworks and found that you get the most bang for your buck if you use a light weight and non-intrusive framework. Drum roll please; CodeIgniter in my opinion is the best PHP framework out there today. CodeIgniter is not without its shortcomings but all things considered it is light weight, easy to learn, and very robust. There is one change to the core files that I suggest be made on any new installation or upgrade of the core files. In the Loader.php file the following line $model = strtolower($model); should be commented out or deleted. If you do not comment this out you will not be able to create class names such as TableModel instead you will be forced to use Tablemodel or Table_model which drives me nuts for many different reasons, anyway lets move forward here I don’t want to get off on a tangent here. You can Download CodeIgniter here.
When it comes to reporting and charting data again it is easier to just use what the community has given use to use. When we are talking about PHP reporting I there are plenty of paid solutions but, hey I am cheap and I just like everyone else like free stuff, especially when it is quality free stuff. pChart is a very good and free reporting solution written for PHP and another cool bonus is that Andrea Consiligi has created a library for CodeIgniter. pChart is a PHP class oriented framework designed to create aliased charts. Data can be retrieved from SQL queries, CSV files, or manually provided. This project is still under development and new features or fix are made every week. Focus has been put on rendering quality introducing an aliasing algorithm to draw eye candy graphics. Rendering speed has been dramatically enhanced since the first version, and is still continuing to be optimising! I don’t think there is an offical page out there for Andrea’s library so I am going to host this download on my site, I am even planning on creating my own library based on Andrea’s library so keep an eye out for it. Any way here are the to download links you need; pChart its self can be downloaded here; Andrea’s library can be downloaded here. And for those wondering here are a few sample peeks at what pChart can do.
Ajax has taken the web development scene by storm. Web 2.0, drag and drop, sliders, sortable lists, movable content, and every other cool effect not done with flash is taking over every application and web page on the web. Now again this is only my opinion but the best framework for Ajax has to be Prototype. Prototype has good documentation, a solid code base, easy to understand, and is actively developed. Prototype is a JavaScript Framework that aims to ease development of dynamic web applications. Featuring a unique, easy-to-use toolkit for class-driven development and the nicest Ajax library around, Prototype is quickly becoming the codebase of choice for web application developers everywhere. One thing that Prototype does not do is give you all the fancy eye candy effects, but do not worry you guessed it there is another framework for effects that uses prototype as its base and you can still use Prototype calls separately without conflict, enter Script.aculo.us. Script.aculo.us provides you with an easy-to-use, cross-browser user interface JavaScript library to make your web sites and web applications ” fly”. Together Prototype and Script.aculo.us are in my book DYN-O-MITE. Ok sorry for the track back in time. Well guess what again we have libraries which incorporate Prototype and Script.aculo.us into CodeIgniter, enter stage left Projax. There is not a whole lot for me to say about Projax other than it ties all three CodeIgniter, Prototype and Script.aculo.us togther make life super easy. Again I am including links to download all three Projax, Prototype and Script.aculo.us. Projax can be downloaded here. Prototype can be downloaded here. Scriptaculous can be download here.
Well we have come to the end of the road. I hope I have disclosed some useful information for someone. I use all the tools listed here on a regular bases as do many other programmers. I just thought it might be useful for some of the newbies out there if someone wrote it down and made it available for them to read. If you feel like I left something out let me know and I will take a look at it. Also if you feel different I want to here that too. I know everyone has there own opinions, and this one happens to be mine, so please be cautious with your constructive criticisms.
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Ajax Projects
