Alternatives to CakePHP

Back at the start of 2017, we decided to create a web-based tool for the SEO OnPage analysis of our clients' websites. We had over 2.000 websites to analyze, so we had to perform thousands of requests to get every single page from those websites, process the information and save the big amounts of data somewhere.

Very soon we realized that the initial chosen script language and database, PHP, Laravel and MySQL, was not going to be able to cope efficiently with such a task.

By that time, we were doing some experiments for other projects with a language we had recently get to know, Go , so we decided to get a try and code the crawler using it. It was fantastic, we could process much more data with way less CPU power and in less time. By using the concurrency abilites that the language has to offers, we could also do more Http requests in less time.

Unfortunately, I have no comparison numbers to show about the performance differences between Go and PHP since the difference was so clear from the beginning and that we didn't feel the need to do further comparison tests nor document it. We just switched fully to Go.

There was still a problem: despite the big amount of Data we were generating, MySQL was performing very well, but as we were adding more and more features to the software and with those features more and more different type of data to save, it was a nightmare for the database architects to structure everything correctly on the database, so it was clear what we had to do next: switch to a NoSQL database. So we switched to MongoDB, and it was also fantastic: we were expending almost zero time in thinking how to structure the Database and the performance also seemed to be better, but again, I have no comparison numbers to show due to the lack of time.

We also decided to switch the website from PHP and Laravel to JavaScript and Node.js and ExpressJS since working with the JSON Data that we were saving now in the Database would be easier.

As of now, we don't only use the tool intern but we also opened it for everyone to use for free: https://tool-seo.com

I use Laravel because it's the most advances PHP framework out there, easy to maintain, easy to upgrade and most of all : easy to get a handle on, and to follow every new technology ! PhpStorm is our main software to code, as of simplicity and full range of tools for a modern application.

Google Analytics Analytics of course for a tailored analytics, Bulma as an innovative CSS framework, coupled with our Sass (Scss) pre-processor.

As of more basic stuff, we use HTML5, JavaScript (but with Vue.js too) and Webpack to handle the generation of all this.

To deploy, we set up Buddy to easily send the updates on our nginx / Ubuntu server, where it will connect to our GitHub Git private repository, pull and do all the operations needed with Deployer .

CloudFlare ensure the rapidity of distribution of our content, and Let's Encrypt the https certificate that is more than necessary when we'll want to sell some products with our Stripe api calls.

Asana is here to let us list all the functionalities, possibilities and ideas we want to implement.

I have used PHP to do end to end developments , using Laravel CodeIgniter frameworks.