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A partner has a website that needs to be rebuild from scratch as it simply can't cope with the large number of visitors (currently build using SilverStripe). The site should be able to deal with 5 million or more members using 20+ languages.
We were considering using CodeIgniter or YII because from research both appear to be excellent performers. However several people advised that we should consider the latest version of Joomla for this. For small websites we are happy to use Joomla but for a heavy load website our feeling says that we have to stay away from that. We are however not able to find any comparison between both from a performance point of view but we do require good arguments why Joomla would or would not at all be a good candidate for this. One comparison can be found here: http://vschart.com/compare/yii/vs/joomla/vs/codeigniter however this doens't tell me what to expect when the number of visitors is really high.
Can some advise how Joomla compares to CodeIngitor or YII considering that the site will receive a very high number of vistors and will use a 20+ languages (for silverstripe we build a translator module as the build in CMS was not usefull when using so many translators).
When you're dealing with a site of that scale, it's probably best not to shift to Joomla. Joomla can handle a fair bit, but I'd suggest that it would be far easier to have a Joomla site that large when the site has been adapting as the traffic increases.
Part of what makes your question hard to answer is that we don't know much about what your current site does.
Is it mainly a CMS? If so, Drupal may be a decent fit for you.
Is it a custom web application? It sounds like it could be, based on the number of translations you're handling.
Is it somewhere in-between? This could also be what you're dealing with.
If you're looking at either of the bottom two options, yes, shifting away from SilverStripe (but not to Joomla) sounds like it might be a good thing.
Given the volume of traffic you're dealing with, it sounds like you probably already have a revenue stream and a development team. In that case, it might be worth having a few of your developers play with CodeIgniter and Yii and see what they think.
I wrote up a detailed answer to a question about what type of framework to choose a while ago, which you can look over here:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10095906/yii-or-zend-or-other-frameworks-under-the-following-requirements/10115678#10115678
I'm a Yii fan, having checked out a bunch of other frameworks. Regardless of which framework you use, I'd like to offer one piece of advice that I've found key on all projects I've worked on.
You want to work with objects, not data arrays
The reason for the above is that your models (and the objects they produce) can end up having your business logic built into them. Doing this makes life far, far easier in the long run. A great book on the subject, aimed at manager's and quite high-level (there is no code, although there might be a few lines of psuedo-code), is Object Technology: A Manager's Guide. I'd highly recommend it.
Framework thoughts
CakePHP
I started dabbling with CakePHP until I found out it didn't hand back objects (just arrays), at which point I ran screaming.
CodeIgniter
Looking at what CodeIgniter has for database model support, I think you would quickly hit its limitations with a site of your size, so would recommend against it. And having EllisLabs deciding to leave CodeIgniter behind (see their website for more details) is not a good sign. The signs say stay away.
Of the PHP frameworks out there, these are the ones I hear the most things about:
Symfony 2
Yii (disclosure: I work with this one daily)
Laravel
Symfony
From what I can see of it, has been a huge stimulus to the PHP community and many best practices have come out of that community. Unit testing, Composer, pushes for PSR-1/2, the ideal of modularity of code (some of their core code is ending up in Drupal 8) are all great things that have spurred the PHP community into writing code that's better than spaghetti code. With that said, it feels kind of heavy and enterprise-y and looked to have a pretty heavy learning curve.
Yii
When I was looking for a framework, I had a lot of legacy code that needed migration. Yii's way of handling things, although opinionated at times, has done a lot for me as far as exposing me to good practices that are used heavily on the web. Highly recommended as well.
Laravel
When I was looking for a framework (2+ years ago), Laravel didn't exist. It's apparently quite slick and cutting edge (haven't looked at it yet, I've been busy landing new work regularly in the Yii world), but I am interested in dabbling with it. That said, here's a thoughtful article about Laravel and couple of considerations that I've wondered about.
The main developer, Taylor Ortwell, seemed to be a dominant force. That's a great thing while he's making money doing this and enjoying it. Not sure what would happen to the framework if he decided to do something else.
The speed of development on the framework is an awesome thing and means that all sorts of creative juices are flowing. It's a great place to go look at cool new things. That said, you're going to want your developers to be able to easily find information about the framework they're working with, which in 3-6 months may be severely out of date in the Laravel community. The Ruby on Rails community has the same type of good/bad problem when I've looked around over there; there is so much information about the new stuff that sometimes it's hard to find information about the version of the framework you're dealing with.
That said, there are lots of cool choices out there :-) I should probably wrap up, as this has gone on far longer than I'd intended. Let us know what you end up deciding and how it ends up going.
How big is the site really? Bigger than joomla.org?
Are you talking about big in terms of the amount of content in the database or in terms of the number of visitors.
Joomla really does not have problems with scale unless you are on an older version of MySQL in which case it slows down.
It depends on what kind of application you want.
If you want a CMS, Joomla is the way to go. Because this is what it was build for.
If you are about to create a real "custom" application Yii/Codeigniter is the way to go. (This is what yii was build for)
Regarding performance, from my expericnece Yii is a lot faster, because it comes with way less overhead. You can build the application just as you need it.
Well it's like compare green and salty. Really joomla is CMS, and Yii and CI are frameworks. If you considering make highload on joomla - it's not your job.
If you have high frontend load - maybe watch on js frameworks? Yii+backbone.js or ext.js for frontend is awesome, since you'll move alot to clientside.
CI is dead. I honestly like it, but its dead already. No extensions, no namespaces in future, nothing.
I can say + of Yii:
*faster then CI;
*have great documentation and wiki articles;
*have great and active community and developers;
What else i can add? Active record is good for small databases, but not usable for highloads. Also as i said on yii you can easily make js framework+yii composition. Yii have good caching system. Long time support of stable versions.
I personally manage highload now, but its more backend/api/database. 150+ thousands database records daily, 300+ thousands requests to api, 50 milions records data table. It works like a clock for more then 2 months already.
Choose what you like, or write on native php if its really big system - best choice from practice.
Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which
enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many
aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla
the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is
an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.
CodeIgniter is an Application Development Framework - a toolkit - for
people who build web sites using PHP. Its goal is to enable you to
develop projects much faster than you could if you were writing code
from scratch, by providing a rich set of libraries for commonly needed
tasks, as well as a simple interface and logical structure to access
these libraries. CodeIgniter lets you creatively focus on your project
by minimizing the amount of code needed for a given task.
Yii is a free, open-source Web application development framework
written in PHP5 that promotes clean, DRY design and encourages rapid
development. It works to streamline your application development and
helps to ensure an extremely efficient, extensible, and maintainable
end product.
Joomla can't compare with CodeIgniter / Yii. But, If you need any CMS for your project, you can use Joomla (or maybe Wordpress). If you want to create any web application, then you need to decide for any PHP Framework. I use CodeIgniter for years, and I like it. They have a huge community, and the best user guide. Yii also has a great community and a lot of features. So, you can decide depending on you demand.
I've spent the better part of my morning and afternoon playing around with GUI frameworks in Haskell, as I need some visualization and interaction capabilities and I'm not in love with writing my core functionality in Haskell then piping out to a front end written in another GUI; I'd prefer to do it all from one language. The better part of that better part has been spent compiling and patching source code, or Googling obscure compilation errors.
I've spent plenty of time reading SO questions, plenty of time on haskell.org, and plenty of time reading documentation. What I've encountered is a very large swath of outdated or poorly documented information. I can boil it down to these three things:
A glut of options built on top of Gtk+ bindings. I don't care for Gtk+ very much, mostly because I find it to be quite unpleasant to look at, especially on OS X. Griping about the UI looking out of place and/or just plain ugly might seem silly, but that's important to me. Especially if I want other people to utilize any of the programs that I create.
wxHaskell, which is stable and incredibly easy to install but many of the existing tutorials seem to be for wx-0.1x and the conventions for bridging the wxWidgets 2.9.x docs to wx-0.90.x are very very spotty and hard to grok, when they even exist.
qtHaskell, which seems to be mostly abandoned (correct me if I'm wrong), only compiles with newer versions of GHC after applying a year-old patch, and spits out a massive amount of warnings that indicate they will soon become compile errors in newer versions of GHC.
In effect, I'm looking for Haskell's answer to Java's Swing; a library that is robust, maintained, well documented, easy to get started with, makes an attempt to be native in look and feel, can keep up with GHC's development pace, and not at high risk for abandonment. This seems to be exactly zero GUI frameworks, but then it seems that most of the "official" resources/wikis/pages/docs related to GUI frameworks are woefully unmaintained so I decided to turn to the community to see if there was something I just wasn't finding. I'm not terribly worried about the framework being cross platform, just so long as it works on modern versions of OS X.
To reiterate, I'm not really looking for someone to send me a link to haskell.org or the WikiBook. I've been there, and I didn't like what I saw. Most of the information there is just so out of date that it only creates more work, not less.
I realize that my "demands" are a little extreme, especially for a language with a smaller community like Haskell, but I was hoping that someone out there could be of assistance to me. In the mean time, I intend to simply try and ride out wxHaskell or qtHaskell until I succeed or die.
I hope I'm not coming across as gruff or frazzled.
wxHaskell is good, yes, and my go-to GUI middle level library. I admit there's been a focus on updating the code before the docs in the new version.
For modern, functional-reactive-programming fun stuff on top of it I gor for reactive banana, which is actively maintained, and has the added benefit that Heinrich Apfelmus himself may well turn up here to answer your questions.
Threepenny-gui is the most recent contender in the space of Haskell GUI libraries.
Its main selling point is that it is very easy to install, because it uses the web browser as a display. It's also easy to get started with.
On the other hand, it doesn't even attempt to have a native look and feel – the UI is built solely on HTML. (This may change in the future, as we have the option of using XUL). Also, the API is still very much in flux, so be prepared that new major versions of the library are likely to break backwards compatibility. (On the other hand, this means that it's actively developed. :-))
(Disclosure: I'm the author / maintainer of the threepenny-gui package.)
I feel your pain; this answer is an attempt to provide some alternatives that may be good enough and perhaps help you with your search.
First, there is a language called Concurrent Clean. It is supposed to be similar to Haskell, has GUI support and is meant for writing real-world applications. It differs in some respects; for instance, its I/O is based on unique types rather than Monads, which as far as I'm concerned, is a good thing :). Here is a link:
http://wiki.clean.cs.ru.nl/Clean
Next, I dug around for a Haskell compiled to the JVM, in the hopes that it would piggy-back on the Java libraries, ala Clojure. No dice. What I did find was a SO thread discussing the lack and the challenges thereof:
Haskell on JVM?
From that thread however, two other options were brought up. One is Frege:
http://code.google.com/p/frege/
The other is CAL:
https://github.com/levans/Open-Quark
There's also work on functional reactive programming in Haskell. It's supposed to enable things like GUIs, although whether or not you'll actually get a GUI out of it is another matter:
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Functional_Reactive_Programming
It's sad. Here we have the JVM and .NET and yet zilch for Haskell. It's worse than that; .NET has shown an alarming tendency to ditch promising implementations. Whatever happened to IronScheme, IronLisp and IronHaskell? All dead as far as I can tell.
Not good :(
I am looking into developing a commercial application using PHP. Since I have experience in CodeIgniter and it has been working well for me, I decided to use it. Now, if ever my application comes to a point that it needs to grow and have to have custom modifications in the platform, is it possible to modify the CodeIgniter source code to the point that it's far from the original?
I'd strongly recommend not modifying the source code as this is the back bone of the application will make updating to futures releases of codeigniter impossible.
Instead you should be creating your own classes/libraries that extend the core bases. This is best practice.
The codeigniter users guide has some fantastic information regarding this, http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/general/creating_libraries.html
Good luck.
Don't modify it, extend it. Ellislab is good about releasing bug fixes and patches, and the last thing you want is to have to re-engineer all the updates into your new hybrid everytime they release updated source code. Plus, different features and bug fixes are released at different paces for the core and reactor, so unless you plan to lock your framework in at the current version, extending is the way to go.
The good news is CI is built for and encourages extensions of the source. The system folder and the application folder separation are a clear indication of how you should segregate your enhancements from the base libraries.
CodeIgniter is written in PHP. You can completely rewrite the framework anyway you like. So the answer is "yes".
There are many big websites that were written in a different language or build on a framework when they started and have been rewritten many times since. I think a lot of developers (mostly freelancers) are over-thinking when starting out. When I start a project, then I try to get it done and get it out in the web asap. If a website starts taking of - and most of the times start making you money - then you can always take the time to rewrite it.
I think it is a lot more important to spend time when you plan and design your database and tables. I think it is a lot harder to redo parts of your database later on then it is to rewrite the code that uses the data.
Just my 2 cents.
If you have used CI, then you should know that being a PHP framework that all of the source-code is there in the download, furthermore opening the system and application folders and looking through there will tell you a lot. Yes all of the source is there in plain English (plain programming English) and not only is it in plain English but has been extensively documented inside and out (literally that is in the source and in the user-guide). CI gained initial fame from that simple fact, that all code is extensively and meticulously documented.
Beyond all that, the question itself raises concerns that maybe you should study CI a bit further before writing commercial applications using it. Ci is a powerful and very easy to use PHP framework, but it is not a WYSIWYG. In my opinion, a coder should know his tools inside and out in order to be able to create a solid secure and trusted application. The first measure of which is to read the user manual, you should know at the very least everything in it, and since there are 12 sections in it that cover everything from extending CI libraries to creating your own libraries, and everything in between I would say you need to spend a little more time with it.
I want to say though, I am not being rude or trying to shame you in any way I am simply saying that you should learn the framework a bit more before venturing into a commercial application using it.
In the early days of PHP people realized how amazingly easy it was to use and how fast you could write an application with it. At the time the major options where very difficult for new and hobby programmers to use or involved expensive software to run, PHP was free, easy to learn and most of all ran on a free OS. It also took hardly any setup to get going, you could download PHP and essentially be programming in minutes. All of these factors lead to the almost destruction of the language.
Entry level programmers were destroying it with bits of code taken from other applications, never knowing (or caring) what the code actually did beyond the simple fact that it did what they wanted at the time, never considering or even investigating if the code might be harmful. Because of this practice PHP applications that had grown to Goliath sized websites, taking thousands of hits an hour were:
beginning to crash
being hacked to reveal sensitive customer/client data
generally crumbling all around the web
All because since the language was so easy to use that people had taken advantage of it and failed to take time to learn it. PHP was becoming a joke to other professional programmers and wasn't even thought of as a viable application language by many who had dubbed it "the copy and paste" language.
So my advice to you, please take the time to know your tools inside and out, what makes them tick, if they have any gotchas and where they are vulnerable. I understand that in order to learn a language to a professional level you have to build with it so I suggest that you take it slow with CI stick to the core for now. Trust me when I say that even in its purest form CI is an amazing and powerful tool that in the right hands can create awesome powerful web application, but in the uneducated/inexperienced hands it can create havoc and destruction.
So (stepping off of the soap box) I simply ask that if you are serious about creating commercial applications period that you take your time and learn your tools/language become as close to an expert on them as possible. I gurentee that if you do that you will always have work when you need it and you will spend less hours beating your head against the table or worse explaining to a client why their site is down.
I truly wish you good luck, just slow down and learn your trade and you will do just fine.
Yes, Codeigniter is an open source framework. However, I would advise against modifying the core of Codeigniter, as most files can be extended and rewritten safely without modifying the core files which will cause you headaches if you ever decide to update.
To extend a core class by default you would do this in Codeigniter. We'll extended the parser class for this example, but this applies to all classes pretty much. This link in the comprehensive user guide will give you all the information you need to extended and overload methods inside of a Codeigniter core class: http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/general/core_classes.html
Is VCL dead, or does it have a future as a GUI library? As CLX ended, is there any chance for cross-platform support in future releases?
I've had to do some work with legacy app that uses Borland's VCL(BCB6). Now that new features have to be implemented, it's necessary to revalue alternatives. Whether to stick with VCL or migrate to some other library/framework.
I've never read much what's happening in the field Embarcadero(Borland) tools. At least there seems to be only few VCL tagged questions here in SO and no much luck with google either.
Whether to continue using VCL in your project, or migrate to an alternative depends alot on your requirements. The VCL framework is powerful and mature, with lots of 3rd party components, which makes it a good idea to consider. The alternatives have been improving rapidly, and to point out one as the ultimate choice really requires you to carefully consider your requirements, and validate the strengths and weaknesses of the different frameworks.
Considering that cross platform is on the road map, I remind you that so has 64 bit support been for quite a while. We might see cross platform support, perhaps on schedule, perhaps delayed as we have seen with many previous features. I want to believe its coming because I truly like the VCL framework, but I always have a natural doubt concerning the official road map of the RAD studio series - sorry David. ;)
If you've researched the different alternatives, and found VCL to be the best choice based on its relevance to your project, then I'd consider using the VCL framework, especially if it is a framework you are familiar with. Learning a new framework can - while often a good idea - be a time consuming job. So even though there might be a risk of the framework not being held alive (as will there be with any alternatives) you might save a lot of work staying with the familiar framework, if it is the framework that suits your project the most.
If you do consider going with C++ Builder and the VCL, you might find that the C++ Builder Journal is a valuable source of information, they have a relatively quite forum, but with some interesting posts in it, and some free hints on their website: www.bcbjournal.com.
Of course there is also the embarcadero forums, and this site, it may be a good idea to search the Delphi forums and categories, since it seems there are more active users on these, and by far more posts. One good thing though, is that conversion from Delphi to C++ in VCL related questions is quite simple.
VCL is undergoing continued development.
Cross platform is on the current roadmap.
The embarcadero forums are still a valuable resource.
As a user of VCL I must say that your observations are truly correct. VCL might appeal to you, but the resources available compared to QT and other toolkits is poor at least esp. at SO. Our team have also found several bugs in their components, and have more than once patched components to make our application stable. Still for me the main reason to migrate is that VCL locks you in with a single set of development tools. I must admit that I have a hard time trying to find any really good reasons to continue to use it if you have the resources to migrate.
Given that bcc32 and its libraries is also very buggy, the lockin gets even more serious, The last months me and my team have spent more time fixing issues caused by the compiler than actually developing features. For me this is such a serious impediment that its cost overweight its benefits tenfold. Unfortunately the costs of migrating for us is so high that we at least for now have to endure its pains.
Right now I'm not sure...
I'd say yes. I'm using it. I know for a fact that Universal are using it on some of their (thousands of) sites. I will add some caveats, however:
There are serious problems with setting it up, especially if you want to debug into the libraries.
The helper functions favour prototype, as opposed to the more modern jQuery. This is changing rapidly, however.
The documentation is a bit chaotic, again the Castle Team are working on that.
I'm not guaranteeing every last "out-there" feature works, but the point of the system is actually to keep it simple.
Compared to vanilla ASP.NET, it's an absolute joy. I assure you that you won't miss viewstate.
We have been building a fairly large application with it for the past year and a half. Its been nice not to have to deal with the old ASP/Page based model and use the better Model/View/Controller design pattern.
To get the new stuff you really need to work off the trunk of development because they don't do releases very often. We have a lot of tests that get the framework involved so when an update in the framework breaks something we depend on we know about it immediately.
If you have to work in .NET this beats the heck out of the alternatives.
There is an overview on the monorail forum: http://forum.castleproject.org/viewforum.php?f=6
I'm using it for an application and haven't had any big issues with it.
The biggest problem is indeed find good documentation and examples.
I've had no problems setting it up. Julian, I don't think it is constructive to say things like "serious problems" without any further clarification or example.
Debugging into the libraries is trivial. Because it's open source, you can debug into the whole thing.
I've been using MonoRail for production for ages on many projects, as an employee, as an indie contractor, and for non-work related sites.
I know I'm biased on that, however I can whole heartedly promise that my positive usage experience is what lured me into contributing to the project, not the other way around.