Phil Sturgeon

"ORMs are overweight, slow, hard to work with, pointless and for people who don't know how to use SQL". These are all arguments we have all heard - and in some cases in the past I have even used - but this is a stupid argument made by people who either looked at a "Getting Started" page and thought "yuck" or tried a bad clam and decided to avoid seafood for the rest of their life. In this article I'll explain why I have converted from a fully anti-ORM developer to somebody who strongly reccomends you give a [good] ORM a try.

As you may have seen in my last article I'm currently off traveling the world (well, North America for now at least) and I wanted to give people a quick update as to what is going on with various projects while that is happening. The good news is nothing is being dropped and everything is coming along really nicely, but I'll just quickly explain what my projects are and why and how I stay involved with them all.

This summer I'll be travelling around U.S.A with nothing much more than a Greyhound coach pass, a laptop, a map and of course a smart-phone. On the way I'll be meeting developers, talking at a few offices offering Git/CodeIgniter/Fuel training and having several nerd-beers along the way. To help people see what I'm up to and to help connect with people as I go I've created a funky web-app: TravlrApp. It is a social networking site to help make travelling more social, more manageable and more open.  Using services like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Instagram you can mark your activity on a map automatically and your friends can see what you've been up to. Currently it is in private beta, but invites are available to anyone who subscribes on the homepage, and existing users have 10 invites.

The CodeIgniter Community has decided to have a little holiday this summer, and head to New York for not just a meet up, but the biggest gathering of CodeIgniter developers to ever happen. There will be talks from the CodeIgniter Reactor Engineers, the EllisLab teams themselves and people involved in Forrst, PyroCMS, PHPFog and all sorts of other exciting things. There will be masterclasses teaching you the basics if you are pretty new to CodeIgniter, or an advanced track showing you how to do some crazy stuff. Something for everyone!

So we all know that the internet is full of frameworks. They've been the popular thing for the last 5 or 6 years and it seems to have become the "barrier for entry" or the "passage of rights" that 8 or 9 years ago used to be "hey I just wrote a phpBB clone!". There are plenty around but in this day in age, why would anyone write a new one? As somebody involved in a new PHP framework "Fuel" that has shaken a few opinions up I thought it would be interesting to share my thoughts and views on the situation.

After years of being an active member in the CodeIgniter community I have decided it is time to change things up and move on. Where is that move taking me? Recently I have been doing a lot of research into various frameworks and I have made a final decision. Read on to find out what framework I decided to go with and why.

Tonight I started working on the RESTful API for PancakeApp - an invoicing system built in CodeIgniter - when I remembered how many people have been asking for help using REST_Controller. I wrote up an article on NetTuts last year hoping that would cover the majority of questions, but with new features like API Keys, Limiting and Logging being added I thought a quick run-through was in order. This video covers the basic implementation, HTTP Basic/Digest authentication, format switching and goes onto the new API Key and logging features. As this is an admittedly an unplanned video I'll be accepting answers to the question "How many mistakes did I make?" on the back of a postcard.

Development of FuelPHP has come a long way since Dan and myself started work on the system a few months ago and it's command line utility has progressed amazingly. I spent all of yesterday polishing off this package and now we have Rails-style scaffolding and migrations working perfectly. This video shows off the basic functionality of Oil by running through scaffolding creation and quickly brushing on migration work.

What makes Reactor so much more different than CodeIgniter has been in the past? Anyone can be involved wether you are a hard-core developer who is happy to jump into the codebase and start changing things and adding features, or a new user who just wants to request some new features, you can do this on the UserVoice or send in your code using BitBucket and GitHub.

Having a quiet night in before a long day of kayaking I thought I'd write some fun code instead of banging out the usual shit like I've been doing all day. Convert between Array, Object, JSON, XML, CSV and Serialized data and back again easily. I'll add a few more types like YAML when I can be arsed to work out PECL for MAMP.