I've been stuff with Phalcon for a few years, but it's mostly private experimental hobby stuff. Nothing with real money on the line. Is it just another example of an Open Source project that fails to get traction? Is it a marketing problem? Is it more popular than I realize?
I'll tell you my recent personal story.
On my current job, there are few working independant companies, in which I even do not know who is working. Nor people, nor what projects they are making.
So one morning, on big company Parking, after parking my car, I saw some colleague from those companies, so I rushed to parallel with one of them until to the offices and decided to make small talk...
So we spoke about what we are doing, what programming langs, bla bla. Tipical conversion with 2 random persons. At the end, the dialog was something like that:
- Me: What is your company doing?
- Colleague: casino games
- Me: In what langs?
- Colleague: Mostly Python, little bit with C... Ah, and Zephir with mathematical calculations and Phalcon for our backoffice
- Me: Zephir? Incredible
After that, I understood that even having Python, people manage to use Zephir... Which makes me proud to be Core Developer of Phalcon PHP Framework. =)
Yes, for example g2a.com
It's like food, you need to try it before... Phalcon is particular, his resource efficient in the sense that you just have to integrate the extension (1 file) into PHP. You don't have to duplicate several times a lot of files for all your projects by using a composer install. And I think there are a lot of project using it, it's just that they don't talk about it.
Possibly it is because of marketing, since people generally look for popular technologies and do not investigate more alternatives that may be better.
And a little bit because of the documentation and when looking for examples online to learn it for those of us who are new.
But the good thing is that this forum exists to ask for help and repos on github. They help a lot.