Safe to use cakephp 3.0 for production?

Question

We are starting a new project and it won't be done for 2-3 months. Should I build on version 3.0 since beta 3 was just released or continue with 2.5 and convert over when 3.0 stable is finally out?

Answer 1

You will need to define what "safe" means to your standards.

Safe as to security? I'd say pretty much yes. The project has 10 years on its back, potent programmers, several eyes that scrutinize it since early alphas, so I wouldn't expect anything major to slip there because of the beta status.

Safe as to whether it's close enough to be coming out and not become vaporware? That's a definite yes. You can check the daily active development and the number of people that commit to the code and docs to be sure about it. It's no "one man's project" to worry about.

Safe as to "good code investment"? That too is a yes. While there won't be that many plugins or code example for the first months as are now for 2.x, the new ORM is a joy to work on, much faster and cleaner and once finished you'll have a project on recent codebase that won't require major rewrites. Of course until it hits RC there might be small API changes that you will need to follow but nothing as breaking as alphas or anything that will require you to scrap your code and start over. Once on RC (most probably during December) you might as well consider it as stable as a normal release.

Safe as to performance? That is a yes as well. Tests show that it is as fast as 2.x but has so much more to offer. No worries about bringing your server down because of "beta" status. It might get more optimized in the future but if it starts from the same ground as 2.x it means it will only get faster.

The only "no"s are if safe is defined by "stick to old well tried code to minimize every crazy risk" or if you have a project that can rely on code others have written and won't be touched again in the future unless something breaks.

Answer 2

As they have said in their latest tag release notes:

The CakePHP core team is excited to announce the release of CakePHP 3.0.0-beta3. While we had originally planned on only doing 2 beta releases, we're not entirely satisfied with the current ORM validation workflow, and want to do some additional work there. The new plan is to have at least two RC releases after beta3. The RC releases will be API frozen and no new features or breaking changes will be added.

As the period between their last pre-releases was about a month (except the last one with 50 days):

beta3: Nov 17,

beta2: Sep 28,

beta1: Aug 23,

alpha2: Jul 28,

alpha1: Jun 26,

You can do it at your own risk!

Furthermore, I prefer to wait for a few releases after their stable release and fixing newly mentioned issues by people intending to use their code for production.