web2py vs CodeIgniter

web2py documentation does not follow the common pattern of using Sphinx, MkDocs or ReadTheDocs which is goos for exeperienced developers. Although documentation in form of a book is very easy and good for beginners. Turning web2py the most easy and comprehensive framework to learn and also to teach.

Web2py apps are designed to be portable. With some minor restrictions web2py apps can run on any VPS on SQL databases and/or Mongo, as well as on Google App Engine with the Google Datastore. It is truly code ones and run everywhere. For example at Camio.com we use web2py internally to access a GAE datastore which contains more images than Instagram.

The web2py community is open and friendly and it gives concrete support to newbies and old timers. It's not difficult to get answers from the BDFL Massimo Di Pierro himself.

One really positive aspect of web2py application is their maintainability over the years. Old code works even if the framework is updated to the latest version. Not only that, if code is written well it is very short and a new team can pick it up over in little time.

While web2py has its own web based IDE which is convenient, it works with WinIDE, PyCharm, and Eclipse. The first two explicitly support web2py. The latter requires some configuration.

web2py is very easy to learn for beginners, yet it has a great deal of power and flexibility as application needs become more complex. It includes an impressively comprehensive set of features, making development very productive without the need to integrate a lot of third-party libraries.

The framework is really fast in production after some optimization and fine tuning which can minimize the memory footprint in order to make it run on a really small VPS or slice.

Allows users to easily extend functionality by using external libraries.

Models and controllers live in the context of the HTTP request. So the developer does not have to import the API to access this context at every request.

In other words, the models, controllers and templates in web2py use a domain specific language which uses pure web2py syntax and allows to import any module but exposes a few additional objects.

web2py includes an "admin" app that serves as a web-based IDE for web2py applications. It includes many features, such as application creation, compiling, and packaging; an error ticketing system; a code editor; a debugger; a controller doctest runner; Git and Mercurial integration; and one-click deployment to PythonAnywhere, Google App Engine, and OpenShift.

It is not intended as a full desktop IDE replacement, but it includes some helpful web2py specific functionality and can be convenient for basic editing and debugging tasks and quick prototyping, even for those who primarily work with a more full-featured desktop IDE or editor.

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.

CodeIgniter has a small footprint, just 3MB and that's including the user guide.

The documentation is clear, structured and thorough. It explains both commonly used and CodeIgniter specific concepts and always with clear examples.

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.

The MIT License (MIT)

CodeIgniter is open source and is distributed under the MIT license.

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.

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.

CodeIgniter lets you cache the web pages in order to decrease loading times and increase efficiency and performance.

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.