Comment by Wilya | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Wilya | Hacker News Reader

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We’ve built a framework for developing applications in PHP specifically designed to allow for fast innovation in the high-load, high-performance environment we live in every day while still keeping the API extremely simple to deal with.

Why go with PHP and have to roll your own framework, when you can go with something else, and leverage all the great work that has been done by the Django/Rails/whatever folks? This post tells me all that they have accomplished, which is cool, but doesn't tell the most important thing: why did they choose PHP?

I have to take missions in PHP (Symfony2 and Zend Framework) from time to time, and it really makes me appreciate how much more advanced Rails is. And I don't mean advanced as giving me lots of options for doing obscure things. I mean advanced as doing for me all the repetitive stuff that I would have to do anyway, so that I have much less code to write, much less room to introduce bugs, and I can focus on what really matters. The PHP ecosystem is trying to replicate that, but so far, it's still quite far behind.

Some reasons I can think on top of my head. (Which mean this may not be actual reason for mailchimp).

First is ease of finding developers. This may not be so true now, but the post is from four years ago.

Second, and this may be more important: when initial prototyping the original developer is most fluent in PHP, thus he/she hack away first version in PHP. Thus this make the system PHP-based.

Personally, while I know the goods and awesome features of Rails, Django, etc. my most fluent language is still PHP (from using it years ago). If I happen to have some awesome idea to implement fast, I would still do it in PHP.

>Why go with PHP and have to roll your own framework, when you can go with something else, and leverage all the great work that has been done by the Django/Rails/whatever folks?

To be fair, no one has to roll their own framework in PHP, it has frameworks aplenty. I don't know why anyone would do that.

I wrote an API at work which was originally written in Laravel because it was fast to prototype in.

I've since replaced it with my own "framework" which is mostly a very thin wrapper for several really good packages (router, DI container, events dispatcher and query builder wrapper).

I'm getting 10x performance out of it than I was with Laravel, and overall it's a very small codebase which is easy to understand and test.

So yes, no one "has to roll their own framework in PHP", but there sure are advantages to do so if you know exactly what you need and how to get there.

Fair enough. If it's lightweight then it makes sense.

Do you have a public github repository with that ?

The wrapper can be found here https://github.com/alexbilbie/proton

It seems to me that a microframework like Silex or Slim would be appropriate as well

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