I'm absolutely in love. While I bored was at JAX, I searched around for a PHP framework like Ruby on Rails. I already knew about CakePHP, but I wasn't convinced. I looked at a few others, but nothing caught my eye. Then I discovered Code Igniter.

Code Igniter comes from the people who make Expression Engine. I had already heard great things about that, and I had even considered purchasing a license. Code Igniter, however, is free and open source. It's quite new (first beta was released in February) but it is incredibly professional and already very stable.

Code Igniter does absolutely everything I want it to, and nothing I don't want it to. It's incredibly simple and clean, so there are no surprises or weird tricks. It forces you to organize your code using an MVC structure (actually, a VC structure — using a model is optional). This keeps your code cleaner and easier to maintain. It also comes with a number of libraries that help with common web development things like email and uploaded files.

This weekend, I rewrote my whole custom-made blog code for this site. It only took about 4 or 5 hours, and it was actually fun to do. It also reduced the amount of code I had, and makes it much, much easier to maintain and change in the future. For example, until now I was too lazy to add contact pages properly, so I just added blog articles for Contact Me, etc. and pointed links at these. Now, I've changed the pages to use /contact/me and /contact/hire, and I could easily reuse my blog template. This change took about 10 minutes.

By default, URLs are of the form /class/function/parameters. But if you want to do something different (I use /blog/2006/5/article-name), you can set up routing rules for anything you want. Actually, Code Igniter is totally flexible to let you do whatever you want. Anytime I got stuck, I poked around in the documentation and found that there was something in place specifically for my problem.

Also wonderful: only the minimal amount of PHP is loaded to create each page. You can load classes globally, if you need them, but by default, you only load what you need when you need it. This keeps every page as fast as possible, something I was worried about with other frameworks like CakePHP.

Okay, that's enough ranting. If you use PHP, check out Code Igniter. There are some videos you can watch to see just how easy Code Igniter really is. The user guide is also a pleasant read and explains everything really well.

I had a really nice time in Wiesbaden, Germany at JAX 2006. Apart from being in a gorgeous city, the conference had some interesting content. Most of it was about Java technologies and I won't bore you (and myself) with too much of that, but I also attended sessions on Ruby on Rails, Groovy and AJAX.

It was interesting to get a sense of where the industry is moving. Dynamic languages are becoming much more important, although I find "real" developers are hesitant to move in that direction. Personally, I love the concepts behind Groovy and Ruby. They speed up development and take away much of the painful grunt work involved in regular programming. They might be slower, but in the future as servers get faster, I don't think this will be such a problem.

Another striking trend was an overwhelming buzz and a sense of confusion and mystery around AJAX. Remember, this was a Java conference so many of the participants don't work directly on the web. Some only heard of AJAX for their first time at JAX. There seems to be a big divide between programmers and designers, and neither seems to understand advanced JavaScript programming. Programmers have avoided JavaScript, considering it a simple scripting language. Designers have avoided it for being a programming language. Now that some really sophisticated user interfaces are possible on the web, both sides are starting to get really excited.

Until now, I've totally hated the term AJAX. It's just a buzzword slapped on to something that JavaScript developers have been doing for years, and you know how much I hate buzzwords. Now, I see that it has helped to create awareness and get people excited about the possibilities in the browser. I don't think we will be using the term AJAX for many years, but at the moment it has gotten many people to take web applications more seriously and to start thinking about how they can improve the web. This is always a good thing.

From Tuesday (May 9th) until Thursday (May 11th), I'll be attending JAX 2006, a Java conference in Wiesbaden, Germany. Not only will I learn all about what's new in the Java world, I'll be able to really test out my knowledge of German. (Eek!)

If any of you are going to be there by some freak chance, let me know so we can meet up. For the rest of you, I'll be sure to write about anything that relates to web development and the future of the web.

There is a new charity drive web site Flip Cancer The Bird that will donate $0.50 for each picture sent in. The catch: the picture must have you giving the finger to Cancer.

I think this is a fun idea. I'll have to send in my photo next. :)

I just submitted my first article to EzineArticles.com. I just heard about this site a couple of days ago so I thought I'd try it out. Basically, it's a way to get articles read by a new audience. I won't get paid for it or anything, but ideally people will discover this blog and my writing if my articles get republished in various e-zines or newsletters, etc.

If you do some writing and want to try spreading your articles a bit further, it might be worth looking in to. I'll post again on here if anything incredible comes out of it (though I don't except much yet).