The PHP programming language has indeed matured a lot in the past few years. From its early days as a set of Common Gateway Interface to being the most widely used open source web application development platform, we can’t deny the fact that PHP has contributed a lot to the growth of the web industry. In fact, according to their own website (http://php.net/usage.php), PHP is installed on more than 20 million websites and 75% of Web 2.0 sites are built with PHP.

Along with this growth are the hundreds or even thousands of php frameworks that make developers’ lives a bit easier and more fun. A framework is basically a tool that helps you structure a web application, it may contain a set of tools, practices, and design patterns that get rid of the boilerplate code and take care of the basics for you. In this comparison, we are going to talk about 2 popular PHP frameworks, namely CodeIgniter and Kohana.

CodeIgniter is a powerful open source php framework for building dynamic web applications. It is based on the MVC design pattern. MVC stands for Model-View-Controller, which is basically a design pattern that divides the web application into three interconnected parts to relate the interface and information into its underlying data. The first public version of this framework was released by EllisLab on February 28, 2006. It is now on under the stewardship of BCIT (British Columbia Institute of Technology).

Here are a few reasons why you might want to use CodeIgniter:

• It follows the MVC architecture - Beginner or not, writing good code can be a real pain and maintaining it can even be harder. With this design pattern, it makes sure you avoid spaghetti code. It keeps your code clean. Period.

• Community - Stuck at something? Don’t worry! With the large community using and contributing to this framework, just a simple google search will most likely solve your problem.

• Built in tools and libraries - CI has an included set of tools that helps your development. Ranging from calendar to paginations, this framework makes sure you are well equipped in your coding arena.

Kohana is another open source php framework. It is an HMVC framework, which stands for Hierarchical-Model-View-Controller, which is basically an extension of the MVC design pattern. It somehow does modularization and organization between the different parts of the application. Kohana’s development begun on May 2007 by some members of the CodeIgniter community that decided to fork CodeIgniter. The project was initially called BlueFlame before it was renamed to Kohana in June of the same year. It has a “by the community, for the community” philosophy which explains why it is a straight-to-the-point framework with no commercial strings attached. It contains all the tools you’ll likely need to build a modern day web application.

These are the things that might make you decide to use Kohana:

• Awesome out-of-the-box modules - This framework right here consists of modules that are beneficial and important to a web application. Some of the modules are Auth (handles user authentication and authorization on the different sections of the app), Cache (provides interface for caching engines), Codebench (a code benchmarking tool, which is very helpful when it comes to focusing on the performance and scalability of the web app), Database (agnostic querying and results management), Image (provides a module to handle image manipulation), ORM (Object Relational Mapping), Unittest (provides an easy way of doing unit testing on your code base).

• Strict guidelines - Kohana is referred to by developers as a strict framework when it comes to development. It follows strict object oriented programming practices and coding standards, which is good in practice since it keeps your code clean and maintainable.

• Built in templating - it has a very easy to use template engine.

With all that on the table, let’s take a look at these frameworks’ similarities.

• Free and Open Source - Both CodeIgniter and Kohana are open source and free. That means you don’t have to worry about any payments. Build powerful web applications worry free.

• Well documented - The people behind these frameworks did a good job in providing the users a well written documentations about the framework. What this means is that it helps new developers in the learning curve of getting started with their framework as well as giving the user an overview of what their framework is all about.

• Fast and powerful - These frameworks are lightweight and powerful. It helps developers to build modern day web applications on a more stable pace and without the worry of performance issues.

• MVC architectural pattern - These 2 frameworks follow the same design pattern. Though Kohana is using HMVC which is an extended form of MVC, the core of the framework which is still MVC. It makes the code base much more maintainable and cleaner.

The developers behind these two frameworks have one thing in common, which is on how they can make their framework better and stand out to attract a lot of users and share the same philosophy that the developers have. This time, we will look at what sets these frameworks apart.

• CodeIgniter’s community is just undeniably bigger than Kohana. And a bigger community means better support for developers. CI has already a lot of video tutorials as well as websites that are very helpful for those who are just starting to use php frameworks. Although Kohana also has some tutorials, CI just has so many more users that the amount of videos and blogs is substantially larger.

• Kohana’s Strict PHP 5.2 implementation. Kohana doesn’t use any of the old codes on the previous versions and sticks to the 5.2 iteration of PHP. It was also written to be fully object-oriented.

• Kohana’s extendibility with Cascading Filesystem. This framework is designed to allow you to replace, modify and even extend existing classes and libraries with ease.

The Wrap Up.

That is it folks. Have you decided yet on what framework is for you? Only one thing is for sure though, you will never go wrong with either of these two. Both frameworks are well respected and praised by the community. If you are a beginner looking to sharpen your php skills with a framework, then CodeIgniter with its huge community might be good for you. And if you are an experienced php ninja that somehow wants to experiment and use other tools that might be helpful for a certain project, then Kohana might be the one for you.