[eluser]Myles Wakeham[/eluser]
Now back on topic with CI and Big Projects, I would like to offer that I feel there are distinct ADVANTAGES of CI on big projects. The issue is really what you define as BIG. In my case it isn't so much about the number of users, hits, etc. Its more about the sheer size of an application to be developed.
I have a number of uber-large PHP projects, some in production, some in development, that have been built with CI. Most involve databases with more than 250 tables, and probably about 50 different controllers, etc. I know that is hard to use as a benchmark for big projects, they are projects that have 1-2 yr development cycle on them, so they are pretty huge.
We use SVN for source code management, Trac for testing, milestones, etc. We have about 5 developers on these projects, so the teams aren't huge but it works well. Once we built our own libraries for certain functions, producing 'standard' capabilities in the apps is easy. We build all of our forms dynamically from metadata and we use Firebird SQL as our back-end database. All DB interaction is done through stored procedures which has taken a lot of the burden from CI. We also use Smarty for our form UI handling.
So far, no complaints. Some apps have been in production for about 2 years and never had an issue with CI, Firebird, etc. Its all good. The uber-big one we're working on right now is in late stage development and so far, its damn fast. I'm not concerned about size, scalability, etc. for this because the way that its developed it can be run on a server farm of hardware. I can't say that I've seen any major issues with performance or engineering issues with CI on these larger projects at all. If anything it brings a formal level of framework compliance to the table for all the developers and most importantly it allows us to add to that standard with our own libraries. Now I don't have renegade developers bringing their own 'style' to a big project and creating more issues than solving them.
Anyway my $0.02 worth. Your mileage may vary.
Myles
