I work at a company that has a big (in development for about 7 years) and critical system developed in PHP (PHP 5.3 without frameworks and a few base libraries (AdoDB, NuSoap, Smarty)). It is a monolithic application with many SOAP webservices, a big MySQL database (main table has 33M rows) and a number of background services (crontabs running some shellscripts that calls a php program).
We want to improve that base (the technical debit is already really big) or develop a better one if economically viable.
Other facts:
- we use the PHPStorm IDE (so IntelliJ is an option here if we are talking about Java), but I believe that Visual Studio or Eclipse are both really capable.
- the system needs to be reliable AND easy to maintain (rapid development is desirable but is a minor feature compared to the availability and maintainability of the system);
- we use version control (GIT) and Continuous Integration (Bamboo and Stash from Atlassian)
About Java:
- what are the best production monitoring tools for a JVM in production? Does .NET have something comparable?
- about interface: it is more productive to use JSF for interface (Java) or it is best to use a framework like Spring Boot?
- does Hibernate scales? It is a pretty vague question, I know (we actually use plain SQL without abstractions in our system)
- application servers: is Glassfish ready for production or it is better to use something more "robust" like jBoss?
- anyone has some experience with Oracle Cloud or another Cloud to host Java apps?
About .NET:
- is Visual Studio it REALLY good compared to all other IDEs?
- Scalability: Stackoverflow uses the .NET stack. Are there any other big sites that uses it?
- Price: Are the current licensing prices on Windows Server affordable for medium companies?
- Future: does .NET have a future that we can trust looking forward 10, 12 years ahead?
Any feedback, experience or consideration is really appreciated and will impact our decision.
