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

Optimize SQL queries


You will most definitely need to optimize your SQL queries for use on a large-scale application. Here is a list of the things that you can do to speed them up.

Query caching

Query caching is a part of the CodeIgniter Database library, and allows you to store information in a text file on your server, essentially cutting out the database altogether.

To cache or not to cache?

There are many deciding factors on whether you should cache your queries or not, but generally it is a good idea to do this. A shared hosting environment will benefit more from query caching over a cloud-based system, as retrieving files across multiple servers can be an unwanted burden. Also, if your database is already highly optimized, you are unlikely to see a massive difference in speed—you're simply shifting the speed from a database retrieval system to a file system retrieval system.

Note

Only SELECT queries are cacheable, as these queries are the only ones that produce a result, which can then...