Beyond Coding

Disclaimer: The post indicates my personal opinion, all references about Envato are not official.

The word cloud is getting a lot of attention lately, almost like web 2.0. Marketing gimmick aside, I believe cloud computing does offer a tremendous amount of advantages over traditional computing environment.

At Envato, we use a number of providers for our server needs. We currently have servers with Media Temple, Slicehost and Engine Yard.

Even though Envato was already using Slicehost for some of their applications, I still did my fair share of research before making a suggestion to move away from Media Temple.

I have eventually nailed down to three service providers: Slicehost, Linode and VPS.net.

For Envato, we decided to go with Slicehost, because we already have some servers there, and they offer bandwidth pooling. We would have given Linode a deeper look if they had offered backups (their backups system is still in beta).

Having said that, I was very very impressed by VPS.net, so I decided I should sign up anyway, for my personal projects.

Let’s compare the three services: Slicehost, VPS.net and Media Temple.

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It was over a year ago that I wrote the article that compares CodeIgniter and Kohana. Since then both CodeIgniter and Kohana have seen major progress with the release of CodeIgniter 1.7.0 and Kohana 2.3.

In December 2008, a new PHP framework called Yii has been released to the public with a stable 1.0. There were a lot of new PHP framework released in 2008, but Yii was one of the more recognised ones because:

• The author, Qiang Xue, is the author of the well established PRADO framework.
• It is a simple to use, well organised, PHP 5 only MVC framework.
• It claims to have astonishing performance.

Before I start this round of comparison, let me briefly list my experience with these frameworks, so you may interpret this article with your own judgement.

CodeIgniter: I started using CodeIgniter since its version 1.2.x from a few years ago. During the past few years I have worked on projects mainly using version 1.5.x and 1.6.x. I have now stopped using CodeIgniter in favour of using other PHP 5 only frameworks.

Kohana: I first started using Kohana when it was called BlueFlame back when it was first forked out of CodeIgniter. Since then I have lurked and participated in the Kohana community. All of my recent projects are done in Kohana.

Yii: The 1.0 release of Yii had my attention, but I didn’t really dive into it until about now. However, most of my impressions on Yii are based on its documentation and this article by Daniel.

Let’s see how they compare with each other.

Same notes as before: Grading scale: Limited < Fair < Good < Excellent. If a feature is not available in the distributed package, but is available via 3rd party libraries, I will state that in the comparison. If a feature is available both in the distributed package and via 3rd party libraries, only the official one will get assessed.

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So I had a play with LiteSpeed just recently. Let’s have a look at what the benchmark says.

Tool used: ApacheBench, Version 2.0.40-dev < $Revision: 1.146 $> apache-2.0

Benchmark object: My WordPress blog (homepage), of course I made an exact copy of the current blog you’re seeing to my VPS box (which has both Apache and LiteSpeed installed).

Both Apache and LiteSpeed use default configuration parameters. Since the benchmark was done on the same server, hardware is the same, however there are some software differences.

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Update: There is now a more recent comparison of CodeIgniter 1.7.1, Kohana 2.3.1 and Yii 1.0.3.

When I was reading through my subscribed feeds I came across this post: Notes on Choosing a PHP Framework: A Comparison of CakePHP and the Zend Framework by Chad Kieffer.

Chad has done a great job comparing the two frameworks that he’s interested in. That inspired me to write something up for the frameworks that I prefer and use. :)

I began hunting for PHP frameworks ever since Ruby on Rails hit the street. Coincidentally one of the first PHP frameworks I played with was CakePHP. At that time CakePHP’s documentation was nearly non-existent so I had to seek for an alternative. I did a lot of searches, and researches, and finally I was happy to see CodeIgniter. Its user guide was what impressed me the most, I am sure many of the fellow CI users would agree with me on this one. Because of the excellent documentation, I was able to start working on projects right after I spent a few hours on the user guide! Developing apps on CI was such a breeze! Today, I develop web applications in CodeIgniter, Kohana and Zend Framework. If you want to find out how to use Zend Framework components with CI or Kohana, please read my previous blog entry: Using Zend Framework with CodeIgniter.

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