Codeigniter and Netbeans

I have recently stumbled on some really awesome tools, Code Igniter and Netbeans IDE for PHP development. I’ve used eclipse for Java development through uni and found it really great. After finishing that I found that using eclipse for PHP just was too slow and didn’t have the right tools for the job.

I used dreamweaver for a while but then stumbled on Netbeans and I am really amazed at how it works and so well. The features I love the most are bracket matching, div matching — this is where you select a div or bracket and it highlights the end tag or bracket.

It also does really good code highlighting with php and JavaScript and HTML even if they are all in the same file. It’s not all good though, I found the tag completion annoying and unintuitive so I turned it off but it’s not a big deal.

Codeigniter is really an amazing PHP framework, it has really sped up my development time and was a great help on a recent project I worked on with a shopping cart. It was really easy to pick up and easy as soon I as understood the whole MVC (Model View Controller) thing, it make a lot of sence to have the database code in the model, the view stuff in the view and then the controller in the middle to handle all of the things inbetween.

I will be definately be using it for a lot more projects and there is a great community support for it with a lot of people using it and backed by a company that also sells a CMS called Expression Engine. Codeigniter 2.0 should be coming out soonish and that will be interesting when it does.

Now that this project is over and im now working on more web design we shall see where it takes me and the interesting discoverys I make along the way.

Originally published at kieranandrews.com.au.