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Future of framework / v2

Hi there, sorry for long post! I tried to make it dense, i think everybody new can benefit from it. We love your framework and we wanted to thank you and encourage you to continue with this great work.

We made a research about PHP frameworks and Phalcon appeared to be the best candidate for our "not so small project". We like featureset, conventions, clarity of it quite much, but we are getting little nervous about some things, please calm us down!

  1. Please tell us you are not planning to end the development in 2 or 3 years at least.
  2. Will sources for 1.2 / 1.3 be compatible with Phalcon 2? Or will we need to massively rewrite our code in a future?
  3. Can we get a paid consulting support from you if anything will go wrong?
  4. We don't see any success stories with some big names, we understand you are young project and we got it, but it could be a good leverage for my superiors, if you have some other names than here https://github.com/phalcon/cphalcon/wiki/Powered-by-Phalcon
  5. We don't understand C# (or that language Phalcon is written in), but we see IDE stubs and API. We are telling to ourselves that we don't need to understand the inner code, ideally. Can you confirm us that is unprobably that we got stuck, because we wouldn't be able to understand and extend (override) your broken code in C?

We are standing in front of redoing a project with thousands of classes, tens of controllers, we are looking forward to benefit from your ORM layer, seems quite perfect, now we are "investigating" it step by step if there is everything ok.

I don't want to spam your forum with dumb questions, but certainly i will sometimes contribute and will help you get the feedback (and hopefully answers).

Thank you all very much.. Josef



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answer

For the point 2, the blog says:

... There will be some API changes and the interface will break, thus affecting backward compatibility. All these will be communicated well in advance. However our goal is to keep the API as close to 1.x as possible so as to minimize the changes that current applications will need so as to run in Phalcon 2.0. The whole community is invited to participate once the code is mostly ported in design decisions or new components.

and also

Phalcon 2.0 is passing a large number of unit tests. However, more work is needed to ensure that implemented functionality is compatible with 1.x prior to introducing any major changes.

So my guess is: retro-compatible until all tests passes, then new features will be introduced.

5) We don't understand C# (or that language Phalcon is written in), but we see IDE stubs and API. We are telling to ourselves that we don't need to understand the inner code, ideally. Can you confirm us that is unprobably that we got stuck, because we wouldn't be able to understand and extend (override) your broken code in C?

If you look at zephir code for phalcon 2.0 (https://github.com/phalcon/cphalcon/tree/2.0.0/phalcon) it looks like php, with some new keywords like "let" and arrows after function to indicate the return type (example: -> <Phalcon\Mvc\Model>). It should be easier to edit, but I'm a little worried because if there's a bug, it will be hard to tell if the zephir code i'm writing is wrong or there's something wrong with the C code produced.