Well… here we are, pushing the button on a new version of Trongate that demonstrably smashes the competition across every benchmark known to humanity. A framework with internals that can be pasted into a single AI prompt. A framework that embraces Native PHP - a brave, new kind of coding that works in harmony with AI tools instead of against them.

This morning, the first comment came in on YouTube. It amounted to:

"Why don't you package Trongate as a .phar?"

They are so lost.

Even when the information is staring them in the face… even when everything is screaming, “there’s a better way to do this”, the first thing they do is reach for their tired, old toolkits. They cannot help themselves!

On a personal level, I wish them well. But from a development perspective, I consider them lost causes. Most of them will struggle to get hired, and many will quit web development within the next three years.

NOTE TO FUTURE SELF: Do NOT be disappointed when “they” ignore Trongate and pretend it’s business as usual. It’s what they do. They’ve proven it time and time again. Our target demographic is not the aged and outgoing PHP establishment. Our target demographic is the young, the curious, the intelligent, the forward-thinking, and the entrepreneurial.

Hello DC,
That sounds a bit harsh to me.
Maybe you read this: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/claude-code-broke-coders-analytics-india-magazine-e8rxc
I could see an analogy here.
If you spent uncountable hours and enormous amounts of energy in mastering a skill (using Laravel or one of the likes) and then there appears a new kid on the block (version 2 of the v1-forever) and this new framework produces code that is more then 60 times faster (not 2x, not 10x but over 60x! DaFa - Laravel 8: 52 - Trongate v2: 3223 req/s), it must be emotionally unsettling (to say the least).
It might be so painful one might not want to acknowledge it, cannot bring oneself to looking at it - just pretending it does not exist. Denial as self-preservation.
So, you might as well be a bit kinder and understanding to them.

Remember, it takes one successful huge trongate app to change their minds.
They like to "wallow in the mire"

koolmes - You're absolutely right and I appreciate that post. I think the best strategy, moving forward, is to basically ignore them. All those other PHP frameworks have got much bigger problems than Trongate. The AI tools don't like huge codebases, third-party dependencies and frequently rewritten code. In other words, what all those other frameworks are doing is outdated and I think it will soon be irrelevant.

So, best let them get on with it and I wish good luck to all of them.

Let's also keep in mind, web development itself is facing an existential threat from AI. We're a tiny part part of the web development world right now. I'm aware of that and I don't think anyone will be losing sleep over Trongate. As a matter of fact, in some respects I feel as if the framework wars are over. Now, it's more a battle to see if we still have an industry.

Where Trongate differs is that instead of running away from AI and hoping we still have jobs - we're trying to build something that works in harmony with AI/

Dan - I love your positive vibes and may you never lose that. However, if we cling onto some kind of false hope, we'll only be disappointed. I'm really quite sure that we'll never win over developers who are entrenched in other frameworks. The fact of the matter is, they're not changing. I think that's the truth and I think you'll see that play out, over the next few years.

I'm not so sure about the target demographic being the young people. As far as I can tell, young developers tend to jump on the hype train with "cool" JavaScript frameworks and view PHP as old, boring technology. Most junior developers don't even care about or know PHP at all.

In my opinion, it's the experienced, senior-level devs who can see the real value in a framework like Trongate. The ones who have already burned themselves with over-engineered, constantly changing frameworks and endless dependency updates that break things for no real reason.

I've been there, done that. I had been on the Laravel train before I found Trongate. I've done my Symfony certifications. And yes, I have received that dreaded phone call in the middle of the night when a commercial app collapsed.

I don't know if Trongate will ever win over the PHP community. But I'm sure it is doing the right thing by going native PHP, prioritizing simplicity and rejecting third-party dependencies. That is why I'm here with my full support for DC and the Trongate community.