We're going to handle a client's project that is already using Phalcon Framework. TBH I just recently heard of it. I heard that it's fast because it's running in C? Aside from that, I was checking the repo and it's not as active as Laravel/Symfony. There are few good Docs/resources/tutorials that I can find, I'd appreciate if someone can point me to a good resource aside from the official doc. thanks!
I can suggest my example project : Phalcon Nova Mooc You can find in it Docker-compose/Dockerfiles to build the environnment. There are also tests with Cypress. The project is divided into two parts (API / Front). I also use JWT to login to the API.
You can also go to this repo Phalcon Awesome to discover other projects.
Phalcon's community isn't nearly as large as Laravel or Symfony. The docs are probably the best place to learn it. The docs are quite useful for learning the framework, as most pages are written as overviews of functionality.
One thing you may find is that Phalcon is more of a toolkit than Laravel. Your site/app is built by combining aspects of Phalcon together. While the individual components certainly do work well together, there seems to be less automation than Laravel.
Another thing you'll definitely notice is the speed - as you've mentioned. Laravel is one of the slower frameworks, Phalcon is consistently one of the fastest.
Phalcon is a wonderful framework. Not only because of the performance but also by its ease of use. It is written in Zephir and in-memory resident: there have been developers that ask "where are the code files?" when joining or inheriting a project with Phalcon. Imagine as well to have all the tools in a single PHP file by just typing "Use Phalcon...".
Sources to learn can be the Packt series dedicated to Phalcon, specially https://www.packtpub.com/web-development/phalcon-cookbook Keep in mind that they were written for Phalcon 3.x; v4.0 was launched a few months ago, so you would have to go through the upgrade process (you can try https://github.com/diplopito/Phalcon-Upgrade-Adviser to facilitate the upgrade).
Besides the resources quoted above, this repo gives you a good overview of how to use it in different contexts: https://github.com/phalcon/mvc
Hope you will enjoy Phlying with Phalcon!
The performance is very good. Project directory is clean and you don't have a ton of files to add to the project directory.
The installation process is sometimes a bit tricky, and on shared hosts, your host should agree to install it. Otherwise you need a VPS or server.
TechEmpower (TE) have new round of Benchmark Testings, now at #19. New in ranks is a major boast for performance for PHP , if NGX-PHP is used. This is nginx web server compiled with embedded PHP. the value of How about Phalcon? As a compiled PHP extension, is it available to try with --enable-embed? How about use of globals and Class static instance values? https://github.com/rryqszq4/ngx_php7 Can PHP frameworks be designed without globals?
Phalcon is very easy to setup. Performance is ok.
I'm following TechEmpower's benchmarks. It appears that they've mislabelled the phalcon one as ORM = Raw while on GibHub they used ORM. Needless to say, I have very low opinion of ORMs (and OOP in general). DB queries are the slowest part of a web application, and being in full control of it is very important.
They also tested that Postgresql to be faster than Mysql. I don't know exactly what happpened.
And I'm not sure How is it that raw PHP (php-ngx-pqsql / php-ngx-mysql) are MUCH faster than raw Golang (go-pgx, go-my)??
Btw, I find Golang to be equally easy to work with as Phalcon. Those other PHP frameworks are too complex for me.