When comparing Ruby on Rails vs CodeIgniter, the Slant community recommends Ruby on Rails for most people. In the question“What are the best backend web frameworks?” Ruby on Rails is ranked 5th while CodeIgniter is ranked 17th. The most important reason people chose Ruby on Rails is:
The sheer scale and massive number of developers using Rails has produced a large number of guides, tutorials, plugins, documentation, videos and anything that can help new and old Rails developers.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Massive community with lots of tutorials and guides
The sheer scale and massive number of developers using Rails has produced a large number of guides, tutorials, plugins, documentation, videos and anything that can help new and old Rails developers.
Pro Many plugins (gems) available
There are many third-party plugins (Ruby gems) available for Rails development. The larger ones and those that have a lot of downloads and users are very well documented and easy to use.
Pro Ruby is a nice readable language
Ruby has a very clean syntax that makes code easier to both read and write than more traditional Object Oriented languages, such as Java. For beginning programmers, this means the focus is on the meaning of the program, where it should be, rather than trying to figure out the meaning of obscure characters.
presidents = ["Ford", "Carter", "Reagan", "Bush1", "Clinton", "Bush2"]
for ss in 0...presidents.length
print ss, ": ", presidents[presidents.length - ss - 1], "\n";
end
Pro Good conventions
MVC is a great starting point, and perfect for APIs. You'll rarely if ever have to wonder "where should I put this code?"
Pro Small projects are very easy and it's possible to finish one in very little time
The large number of documentation, tutorials, videos and guides which help new developers who are just starting with Rails make it seem very easy to create a small and simple application by relying on code generation and components that come out of the box with Rails.
Pro Cool language
Pro Supported on every major cloud or VPS hosting service
Rails is supported on every major Cloud hosting service nowadays. There are also countless tutorials that help developers deploy their Rails apps if there are any problems on the way.
Pro Meta-programming capabilities
Pro Beginner-friendly
Setting up CodeIgniter is quick and easy. You can download the version you want from the CI homepage or directly pull the latest version from GitHub. After that, you unzip the contents to the directory that's required. The final step is to edit the config.php
to suit your needs and it's set up and ready for development.
There are also a lot of guides and tutorials from developers who have been using CI for a long time. This is because of the relative old age of the framework and the large community behind it.
Pro Lightweight
CodeIgniter has a small footprint, just 3MB and that's including the user guide.
Pro Well documented
The documentation is clear, structured and thorough. It explains both commonly used and CodeIgniter specific concepts and always with clear examples.
Pro Active community
Because it's relatively old and well-liked, it has an active community of developers behind it. It's used by a lot of websites in production.
Pro Open source
The MIT License (MIT)
CodeIgniter is open source and is distributed under the MIT license.
Pro Stable
CodeIgniter is tested by hundreds of thousand of developers that use it in production. This means that it's very hard for any bugs or problems to go unnoticed. Even when a new version is out, bugs are quickly found and patched up.
Pro Easy to use templating engine
CodeIgniter has it's own templating engine built-in. It's based on a mustache-like templating language which is easy to learn for new developers who have never seen it. While experienced developers will feel very comfortable using it.
Pro Output caching
CodeIgniter lets you cache the web pages in order to decrease loading times and increase efficiency and performance.
Pro CodeIgniter v4 is a complete rewrite
CI4 will be out soon & is a rewrite..
"CodeIgniter 4 is a rewrite of the framework and is not backwards compatible."
So it will support ALOT more newer functionality built-in.
Cons
Con Learning curve seems low at first, but starts becoming steeper
Rails' simplicity is deceptive. It's learning curve is really low at first, and the huge number of tutorials and guides out there for starting with Rails make it even easier. But it starts getting harder and harder as apps become more complicated. If good code conventions and OO design are not followed, then the codebase will be all over the place and it becomes impossible to maintain it.
Con Too much magic
So much behavior is implemented with dynamic behind-the-scenes changes to existing classes that obscure bugs are way too common. Conflicting interactions between multiple plugins that both try to change the same objects are a particularly pernicious example.
Con Too much convention
Con Not a very popular language outside of web development
Con Bad performance
Among the slowest frameworks. If you want to scale, you will have to migrate to another land.
Con Outdated
CodeIgniter was first released during the times of PHP 4. This means that a lot of features that were added later to PHP are not available. Some of these features are:
- Support for namespaces
- Modular separation by default
- Procedural function helpers
While nowadays CodeIgniter can be used along the latest version of PHP, these features were not added so as not to mess with backward compatibility. They can still be used with CI, but it requires extending core files to make it work which is a waste of time and energy and requires advanced knowloedge of both PHP and CI.
Con No unit testing
Con It does not have basic functions
Some of the missing features include controller security, filters in forms and modoles, rules of validation, among others.