I will be posting regular updates regarding the development of the next version of XtGem up until the release. Consider it proof that we're hard at work
I have spent past two months working on a PHP framework that will allow us to develop new features and services much faster than before. Framework is basically a set of predefined functions and rules that we will be able to use as shortcuts and reduce the development time.
PHP community already has a vast selection of existing frameworks, however after spending a lot of time researching different frameworks none seemed to fit my requirements (I'm very picky!). I needed something very light, fast and scalable. Some contenders were faster than others and the closest I came to finding the perfect framework was Fat-Free, whose developer is now working for XtGem.
Frustrated I have decided that I would create my own framework. At first my goal was just to have something light that would act as a base to build an application on. But it grew quick. I have spent past two months breathing and dreaming PHP code and now I think I have a really solid starting point to work from. It's faster than anything currently out there (by almost ~200%, if my personal benchmarks are to be believed), it's scalable, it's functional, it contains some of the best ideas from other frameworks and it's easy to work with.
We have plans to release it as open source library for all PHP community to enjoy. No ETA yet.
While I was hard at work building and tweaking the framework, other team members were working on XtRedo translation interface. It is coming together nicely and we plan to have a private alpha version ready within a couple of weeks. Stay tuned for some teaser screenshots and more details
As for XtGem, the plan is to completely rewrite the current version using the new framework. We already have some code written, but since it's nothing too exciting, I won't talk too much about it.
What's exciting is that we plan to re-work current server backend architecture too. Currently XtGem is being run by 3 powerful (and I mean it - 8 CPU cores, 32GB of RAM, etc) servers, however we hit a brick wall with the current setup - the traffic is coming in faster than we can serve it, thus occasional server issues occur. We know about it and we are constantly struggling to fix them.
Good news is, we're taking the experience we collected during the years and using it to build a redundant and easily scalable cluster of servers. If we see any slowdowns, all we have to do is just flip a switch and new servers will be ready to serve any amount of traffic you can send us
In addition to that, we'll be hiring a dedicated systems administrator to ensure a 24/7 availability of the service.
This is the most professional and advanced setup any mobile hosting platform was offering to-date!