Merging Codeigniter withe Django

[Masum Hasan]

Hi,

I have a class project partially done with Django, but my lab partner has done her part in Codeigniter. I was wondering if it is possible to merge these two and complete the project?

Any thought would help. Thank you in advance!

[Russell Keith-Magee]

Hi Masum,

It depends :-)

You’re not going to get a completely seamless merge - you’re not going to be able to “import” your Django code into her Codeigniter project, or vice versa.

However, you might be able to deploy a site that is “split down the middle” by doing a bit of fancy web server configuration. For example, you could configure your Django application to serve the homepage, and all URLs under /foo; and configure the CodeIgniter project to serve all the urls under /bar, but run them both in the same Apache instance. If you have similar looking templates, the end-user won’t notice when they move from one implementation to the other.

Two big areas of friction will be:

1) When someone logs in, you’ll need to make sure that they’re logged in to both systems, and whatever login credentials you use can be shared. I don’t know anything about CodeIgniter, but Django’s authentication backends are fairly configurable, so you should be able to accommodate this.

2) If there is any shared data between the two projects, you’ll probably need to make both projects talk to the same database. Django provides tools like inspectdb and managed=False to help deal with legacy or external database sources, 

There will probably be other areas of friction too, depending on the nature of your projects.

As an aside, with my used-to-be-a-university-lecturer-and-is-now-a-grumpy-old-man hat on… :-) One of the reasons you are assigned group projects is to teach you how to collaborate. 2 people picking different web frameworks, and then trying to smash them together at the end… that suggests to me that you’ve just missed the point of the project. This is the sort of problem that should be resolved at the start of the project, not patched over at the end.

Yours,

Russ Magee %-)