CI v Yii v Procedural v Whatever Else

[eluser]BrianDHall[/eluser]
Here's a good performance rundown of everything but Yii - and unfortuantely I can find no good real performance test of Yii, so beats the hell out of me. http://amiworks.co.in/talk/codeigniter-i...framework/

Now this shows that CI, even being the fastest of all the main frameworks (not testing Yii), is still slower than pure PHP. However, this is not a good appraisal of your solution vs CI as obviously you have quite a bit of neet functions and such going on.

Now, you mentioned using some extra hardware. There is no reason you can't use a clustered or cloud solution with CI - CI adapts extremely easy to even the largest of such scaling. If you need 20 load balanced front-end servers and 10 DB servers (segmented into two sets of 5, 4 being load-balanced mirrors of each master DB server, and inserts/updates only done against the main DB server, with an attempt at seperating intensive tasks between the two master servers - which is near-trivially doable in a 'warm' environment so you manually load-balance). Throw in some more stripped-down content servers for your static files, minimized (for CSS and java) and gzip encoded with heavy caching and a well-configured firewall and jesus christ on a cracker, you have one hell of a robust solution.

I sympathize with you on going from Procedural to CI, because that's exactly what I did. I was faced with having a bonus if I could finish a 2-page list that could not reasonably done with the existing solution, so I needed to rewrite it entirely. I did this with functional PHP from scratch on time, yay!

...and I had spaghetti code I didn't really like, so I tried to port it to CI. Only took 2-3 days from never having used a framework before.

If I were you I'd go with CI and Git source control from the beginning, clearly lay out the tasks to each developer, and go for it.

CI has a 'lets get started' learning curve measured best in hours for experienced programmers - not days or weeks. Meanwhile I tried symphony and couldn't get through the first three chapters of the damn tutorial that was supposed to be so easy to follow. Damned command line.

If you need something now without previous experience in MVC or Frameworks, I think it is logically impossible for you to pick any better framework. Its practically what CI is designed for. Rasmus Lerdorf notes it is his favorite framework in his keynote speach on simplicity: http://szeged2008.drupalcon.org/program/...imple-hard

CI will permit you to use your existing functions if you want, or even wrap them for other developer simplicity if need be. It has easyish to learn ORM from Datamapper Overzealous Extention (I highly recomend - I didn't use for my first project but am for my second, and wish I'd used it for the first - am considering a refactoring to use it). Its easy to refactor as you go, so you can clean up any messes you make without too much difficulty, so don't freak about doing things the 'wrong' way to start with.

I recommend you invest in the few days it takes to get everyone setup with netbeans with XDebug - soooo important for you, you will hate yourself if you don't get setup with a debugger, but what IDE you choose is up to you I just like Netbeans now a lot - and source control, and get going. Don't worry about your existing libraries, use CI and ORM if you feel comfortable as there is FANTASTIC documentation and tutorials they can use to learn as they go.

If you run into something that makes you go "Well hell, Zend has a great library for this"...use it, CI allows it. If you find one of your own functions you really want, stick it in a library or helper and go for it! "Helper" functions are purely...well, functional, so CI will happily accept yours.

Yii is much smaller, less documented, more 'magic' (harder to understand), more bleeding-edge - I didn't even consider it for my project, so I can't recommend it. CI I can honestly say I think you will really, really be happy with.