Topic: Kohana Framework

[hans]

I've been getting back into PHP programming and I've been using the CodeIgniter framework but I just stumbled on the Kohana framework that looks like it's a fork of CI. It's supposed to be PHP5 and even leaner than CI which would be nice. And I imagine that since it's a fork, the learning curve would be a little bit less.

Anyone use it? It seems lesser known but possibly the "next best" kind of thing. At least until CI 2 comes out.

[ober]

Never heard of it.  Honestly, if I was investing time in a framework it would probably be Zend.

[hans]

After evaluating a few of them, I decided on CI since it was the smallest and lowest learning curve I felt. It didn't have all the features (it had enough for me) but I had a much better feel for what was going on, and honestly, I'm still not a huge fan of a bunch of magic in my coding (I get that in Grails). The "old" developer side of me likes a little less dynamic stuff.
Zend seems more like Grails, where it's a larger heavier framework (although Grails is lighter than other Java stuff) and for the stuff I'm looking to do, that just isn't necessary. If I'm going to do something big, I'll do it in Grails since it will run on a dedicated host. CI projects on the other hand I see running on shared hosting.

[micah]

it has apparently been decided at my new job to use Kohana as our primary framework going forward.  The documentation on the latest version (which is completely different from their previous iterations) is very lacking and I'm not a big fan of their user community (which seems to be mostly made up of self-proclaimed elitists who just reply to questions with "RTFM").  But it is very lightweight.  We'll see what happens.  If anyone else ends up playing around with it, feel free to post your thoughts.

[hans]

I'm struggling to learn ko3 right now, so I'd love to bounce findings off of each other. I like the concept of a lightweight php framework, but I'm having a tough time finding examples to do even simple things like a basic CRUD application.

Some of the things I've "appreciated" a bit in other frameworks, like setting form fields automatically and ORM sorts of things seem a lot more manual with Kohana.

I still need to figure out things like authentication and stuff too. I've got database connectivity and view rending though. So it's a start. It's just much faster for me to prototype/build things using Grails since I know it fairly well.

Any idea why you guys "picked" Kohana vs other frameworks like CI/Rails/Django etc?

I have a feeling once you get the hang of it, it will probably be enjoyable to work with, but I hate learning curves. Why can't all the frameworks get together and decide to do the same thing?

[-KEN-]

Never really used Kohana, but I've been playing with Ushahidi at work, which is built on it. Seems OK so far.

[hans]

Good find. That should be useful on how to do some things.

[hans]

Oh, looks like it's built on an older version of Kohana. I've been playing around with KO3 and that app looks like the previous version, which I believe is more like CodeIgniter.

In case anyone is looking for a CodeIngiter app, I just found out about OpenVBX from Twilio that's built using CodeIgniter.