Book Image

CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development

By : Adam Griffiths
Book Image

CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development

By: Adam Griffiths

Overview of this book

<p>CodeIgniter is an open source PHP framework with a small footprint and exceptional performance. It gives you a rich set of libraries for common tasks, with a simple interface to access them. There are several unexplored aspects of CodeIgniter that can help developers build applications more easily and quickly. In this book, you will learn the intricacies of the framework and explore some of its hidden gems.<br /><br />If you want to get the most out of CodeIgniter, this book is for you. It teaches you what you need to know to use CodeIgniter on a daily basis. You will create mini-applications that teach a specific technique and let you build on top of the base. <br /><br />This book will take you through developing applications with CodeIgniter. You will learn how to make your CodeIgniter application more secure than a default installation, how to build large-scale applications and web services, how to release code to the community, and much more. You will be able to authenticate users, validate forms, and also build libraries to complete different tasks and functions.<br /><br />The book starts off introducing the framework and how to install it on your web server or a local machine. You are introduced to the Model-View-Controller design pattern and how it will affect your development. Some important parts of the CodeIgniter Style Guide are included to keep CodeIgniter development as standardized as possible; this helps greatly when working as part of a team or taking on an old CodeIgniter project. You will quickly move on to how CodeIgniter URLs work and learn about CodeIgniter-specific files such as helpers and plugins. By the time you finish this book, you will be able to create a CodeIgniter application of any size with confidence, ease, and speed.</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Handling database tables


You might find that your library needs to make use of a database table. There are a few ways that you can go about including a database table, but which way is the best?

Include a .sql file

Personally, this is my preferred method of including a database table with my libraries.

I simply include a .sql file, along with all of the MySQL queries needed to create all of the tables. This is the easiest method of including a way to create the tables for the library developer, although it's not so easy for the developer trying to use the library. It's not ideal, but it works well.

Include an install file

Another method would be to create an install file that connects to the database and creates all of the tables. The problem with this method is that it takes time to build and you don't know how far to go with it. Do you ask for the database details? Do you write over config/database.php?

To be honest with you, I feel that an install file for a library would be total overkill...