So, it came the moment in which I have to plan the architecture of my next project. It will be a large one, and will most likely require me to maintain the codebase for the foreseable future. It's a large shopping website, and will have to withstand heavy amounts of traffic.
In the last 6 years I've always used Codeigniter, I trust it to deliver what I need, its performances have been adequate for the tasks I've put it up to, the fact that it doesn't embrace OOP with PHP 5.3+ doesn't really bother me, I've grown accustomed to maintaining CI projects, even large ones, and I don't feel the compulsion to jump into a new framework because of that. Though, performance is a key factor. I was completely sold on Phalcon until I found out HHVM, and now I wonder.
Should I stick to what I know and take advantage of HHVM, or modernize my coding style and embrace Phalcon? I love the way phalcon devs work and approach upgrades. My biggest gripes with large frameworks has always been that many of them at some point feel bored and dive deep into massive refactoring, often for the sake of it, and break my code written in the past few years, forcing me to remain with an obsolete framework and potential security issues.
As far as I've read in these boards, Phalcon 2.0 will remain compatible with all the code written for 1.3. Can the devs be trusted to keep handling the framework in a way that warrants adoption in an enterprise environment? I love PHP and JS to pieces, but these days I envy Java developers for their ability to deploy large bodies of code and be able to keep them secure for decades.
What would you suggest guys?
Thanks in advance for your feedback!