Building a Database-Driven Application with the Code Igniter PHP Framework

Introduction

Now that you have been introduced to the main subject of this series, it’s time to recall the concepts deployed in the preceding tutorial, in case you haven’t had the chance to read it yet. During that article, I discussed a few basic topics you will need to understand to start using Code Igniter, ranging from how to correctly set up its configuration files and understanding its URL routing mechanism, to developing a sample web application, which made use of the Model-View-Controller approach.

Put in a simple way, the application was tasked with displaying a trivial message on screen, a process that was performed by way of two source files. The first one was defined as the application’s controller, and the second one was simply a template file, also known as a “view” within the context of the MVC pattern.

Essentially, the relationship established between these two sample files can be outlined as follows: the controller precisely controls the flow of the application and passes a bunch of data to be embedded into an HTML file to the view, which is finally displayed on screen. That’s all.

However, this initial sample application was pretty primitive, actually. Therefore, in this second part of the series, I’m going to teach you how to use some core classes bundled with Code Igniter, this time for building a MySQL-driven program, which will first fetch some data from a MySQL database table, and then print this information on the browser.

As you’ll see in the next few lines, developing this PHP application will require us to define a model class, apart from building the respective controller and view files. Thus, don’t waste more time in preliminaries and begin reading now!