For some developers, Trongate appeared on the scene around July of last year. This was around the time when I published a video on YouTube, speculating about the reasons why I happen to think Laravel is a dying framework. That video gained quite a lot of attention (not all positive, of course!) and - for some developers - it was their first introduction to the Trongate framework. For about ten days thereafter, the Trongate framework shifted into a phase that some of us like to call, 'The Gold Run'. This was when Trongate suddenly went from zero to acquiring around 20 stars per day on GitHub. At that time, no other PHP framework came close. Indeed, for a short while we were getting more GitHub stars than Laravel and Symfony combined! Given the fact that GitHub stars are the metric by which the popularity of frameworks gets measured, you can be sure that this caused a lot of excitement.
It never lasted.
Sure enough, the novelty factor of that YouTube video died out and within a couple of weeks, Trongate was sent back to the realms of obscurity.
Although I didn't know it at the time, the sudden ending of the Gold Run was a good thing. Indeed, I think it was necessary. That's because the Gold Run was kicked-started by something that was, basically, negative. Yes, we picked up some GitHub stars and a few users. However, we also made a lot of enemies. The anger and the wrath of some members of the Laravel community should not be underestimated.
What I've now come to realise is that Trongate doesn't have to become successful because somebody has been bad-mouthing Laravel or any other framework. As a matter of fact, it's entirely possible for Laravel and Trongate to thrive at the same time. For those of us who have been with Trongate, since day one, I can confidently declare that our goal has never been to demolish any other framework. Instead, we simply want PHP influencers to come to terms with the fact that there's now an alternative way to use PHP. We call it 'pure PHP'. Right now, there are - unfortunately - a large number of influencers who are in denial about that. Instead of talking about Trongate's unique architecture, our ecosystem, our benchmarks or our revolutionary 'v1 forever' concept, they'd rather talk about how the guy who made the framework must be a bungling idiot or even mentally ill.
The anger and the wrath of some members of the Laravel community should not be underestimated.
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