Need some guidance and ideally some first-hand experience.
We committed to a php framework which, shortly after we built the first rev of the product, stopped all development on the framework for about a year, forked twice, and doesn’t really have a big community to begin with, meaning no plugins, tutorials, etcetera.
For another project we developed on rails and it has been night and day: a robust, continually developed framework and a healthy ecosystem of great plugins and a community that is active, growing, smart and helpful.
But the thought of junking all the sunk time and costs into the framework has been a huge hurdle that I’m not sure we’re ready to cross, to go from php to rails. However, trying to work with this framework/s has had various level of frustration and investment.
Are there some ideas on how such a port could be less painful (staying in php but a similar OO framework that is growing/healthy?)
Suggestions on how we can continue to plow ahead with what we have?
Ideally someone who maybe found themselves in a similar situation would be super helpful for us to get our heads wrapped around it. The internal conversations we keep coming back to and I’d like to find a direction and move forward.
Thanks for some suggestions, or even questions, that will help us build a decision-matrix around it.
PS: The two or three people I’ve met on SO who actually have used this framework have been awesome, so I don’t want it to be a neg on that. Size (of community) at least from our perspective does matter, and I think we just are seeing the comparison with Rails (perhaps that’s an unfair comparison) So thank you!
I can’t answer all of your questions, but I was in a similar situation about 6 months ago. Long story short, I gave up on my own framework and moved to Symfony. I hated the idea of abandoning what I had worked on for so long and was so accustomed to, but I couldn’t ignore the community aspect. Aside from plugins, I needed to be able to ask other people things about the framework – something that just wouldn’t have been possible had I stuck with my own framework. The learning curve sucked (even though I knew it would be inevitable), but in the end I have no regrets after switching. I feel a lot more confident in my products now that I use a mature framework with a healthy community. I would suggest looking at the big name PHP frameworks, and seeing which fits your development style the best.