How mature is F3 for commercial use?

[Michael Kwan]

Hey guys, non-programmer Product guy here, please be gentle :D 

I was recently introduced to F3 by someone who used it to build a fairly complicated marketplace platform. Prior to this I've never heard of F3 as it's (respectfully) fairly unknown and rarely used compared to the giants of Laravel, Ruby, Cake, etc. 

I'm hiring a team of programmers to build an Alibaba-type marketplace; would you say F3 is mature enough for this? Or should I go with a more established (for lack of a better word, pardon my ignorance) framework? From postings here, it seems like it's a small tight-knit community which is cool, but I worry that we may encounter limitations due to this being so niche. 

Thanks in advance and I hope I did not cause any offence to anyone.

[Austin Collier]

I would say it's definitely mature enough to build what you're asking.
Even if you don't understand the whole framework, the code is simple
enough to read and understand what's going on. It does get a little
complicated when you have a large team (10+ devs) because F3 is very
flexible. As long as you have rigid procedures on how things should be
done, you could accommodate a 10+ dev team with it.

On 7/14/21, Michael Kwan via Fat-Free Framework

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[Michael Kwan]

Thanks mate, that's reassuring. I just saw there's a Slack group for F3, would you say the conversation is more active there or here in GGroups?

[Austin Collier]

I'd say Slack wins by a little bit ;)

> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/f3-framework/b1d69f2b-2bf1-4cbc-9e95-f40c6856dab4n%40googlegroups.com.
>

[Emmanuel]

Hi^all ,

Yes imho F3 is mature enough for commercial use .

the point is regarding the learning curve :  easy to learn, good doc with plenty of clever examples when you dig enough either in the official doc or in the plugins , 

regarding the learning curve when "you have a large team (10+ devs) " dixit n0nag0n is the lack of IDE autocompletion for new/popular IDEs expected snippets for PHPStorm you can find here https://fatfreeframework.com/3.7/development#Community and https://fatfreeframework.com/3.7/development#user-plugins and nowadays on Github are a lot of very good stuff but you need to dig enough to find them.

Hope it helps and yes give it a try ! Look, you have EVERYTHING you need in a couple of files (compared to thousands bundled with more known PHP frameworks), so easy to setup , imagine, you can save a submitted form in 3 lines of PHP : https://fatfreeframework.com/3.7/sql-mapper#copyfrom 

Yes, F3 is the most compact PHP framework , you have ALL you need to build your WebApp similar to an Alibaba-type marketplace

Hope it helps, and BEST WISHES with your Ali-like website!

Best Regards

Eman

[Michael Kwan]

Thanks Eman! Last question, how long would a typical Laravel dev take to learn F3 to reach a relatively similar level of their Laravel expertise? Ballpark, say a week? Month? Few months?

[ikkez]

I would say a hardcore laravel dev would probably just need 1 day to get familiar with F3 and 1 week to get productive. However, Laravel is a full-stack framework and F3, though it's packed with a lot of features, calls itself still a micro-framework. Some parts you have in laravel, are not present in F3 by default.. Laravel has a Queue, Filesystem abstraction, migrations, etc.. Sure there're plenty of options to add these things to a F3 base app as well.. you can just use every composer-based package for php available out there, like Enqueue, Flysystem and Phinx. You probably don't need these things at all, that's why Fat-Free is fat free, but with a growing project and growing tasks to solve, your requirements might need some extra packages. That being said, when you have devs that are laravel unicorns, but have a hard time to think outside the box, they won't have it as easy as just following the laravel docs. But.. nevertheless.. it's freedom and it's fun to explore and adopt all these things into the application. I've seen a lot of different setups and packages used together in an F3 app. It's more like painting on a canvas instead of coloring a coloring book... but at the end, you need the creative skills to do so ;-)

[Michael Kwan]

Thanks Ikkez! Really appreciate the detailed reply. I have a better idea of F3 now, thanks everyone!