FuelPHP Forums

Will the 2.0 version of FuelPHP do a Laravel or Kohana and completely rewrite everything rendering all community additions and projects completely useless? I hope the 2.0 update only improves things, but doesn't dramatically change how the framework is laid out or functions.

Harro Verton wrote on Thursday 25th of October 2012:

Underneath 2.0 will be a complete rewrite, as some different architectural choices have been made to fix issues with the current 1.x architecture. These mainly have to do with the context in which the code should run, compared to the global context we use today. That does mean things are going to change, it's unavoidable. If not there would not be any innovation, and you would end up like CI that is quickly becoming outdated as a framework due to the lack of innovation for the sake of stability. Jelmer has written a few blog articles about this that you might want to read. On top of that we're trying to keep the API as stable as possible, to minimize the migration effort. We all make a living writing web applications, rewritting all of them isn't on our list either...

Ah, well that doesn't sound so bad Harro. Thanks for replying so quickly, it's becoming one of the reasons I love FuelPHP more and more each day. The article link posted up earlier looks to have been updated with a follow up post that seems to address the erronous statements in the original one, it is actually pretty accurate and helpful for Fuel now by the looks of it. Can't wait for version 2.0. Is the current version safe to start using or should I wait for an RC?

I don't think so, but I can't comment on your learning skills... <lol>

Let's go through the percived cons in this post: Might be a bit too much to understand for a beginner to intermediate Codeigniter user or PHP developer due to how the file system is laid out. There might be a lot of reasons why you could say Fuel is more complex for a beginner. Very object oriented. Lots of PHP 5.3+ features used. Heavily namespaced. But the file system? It isn't to different from CI. Fuel has an 'app' folder too, and in there the folders for the different file types, like controllers, models, views, config files, etc. It's still a relatively new framework which could have caveats that have yet to rear their heads. Although, I encountered no problems when I used it. Fuel has been around since October 2010, so (in a few days) it's two years old. In that time we've seen 6 releases, and currently we're working on a new major release. That's not entirely new anymore. Documentation is still sparse, a lot of sections are still incomplete.
Docs are still not up to par with CI, but then again, CI is difficult to beat in that area, it's renowned for it's excellent documentation. But we're getting there. If only more people would report missing bits, add suggestions, come up with useful examples... The community is rather small and there aren't really many applications built with it you can learn convention from (yet). Define small. Obviously CI has been around for (in framework land) a very long time, and due to it's accessibility it has attracted a very large crowd. We're not there, and to be honest, we don't want to be there. Altough (we feel) Fuel is relatively easy to grasp, it's not written for the absolute beginner, but for those that write "serious" business applications. So it has built-in support for theming and templating, HMVC, REST and SOAP, full class extensibility, application extensibility through application modules or framework packages, etc. Things like name spacing which is relatively new to PHP might be hard for a Codeigniter developer that hasn't really been exposed to them before, so the slashes in function names might confuse people. Does that say something about the framework, or about the programmer? The amount of developers contributing to the framework is quite low in comparison to Codeigniter or any other PHP framework for that matter, which means one developer quits contributing and the framework could suffer immensely. Huh? How many people exactly work on CI? Including those paid by Ellislab to do that all day? According to github statistics, there are 7 people that have over 100 commits, in all history of CI. FuelPHP has 5, and over 100 people contributing to the code. And lots more writing packages for it. Fuel was started by Dan Horrigan, who is no longer part of the development team. We have a new project lead, a new architect, and we're as strong as ever. So I'd say it's not much of a problem. Also, don't forget that the core team makes a living designing and building web based applications, and Fuel is the motor of most of them. So we have a vested interest in making the framework faster and better, and keep it bugfree. So my 2ct's: Definately outdated, a bit biased, with some hints of truth...

Nothing to worry about, all dev's work on the entire framework. Jelmer has written the ORM, I now maintain it because Jelmer's working on the 2.0 core now.