Hi everybody, I am new to Fantom and it seems like a great platform, really, absolutely outstanding! I think Fantom will probably have a really big role in the industry, especially that it has the beauties of dynamic and static langs. I am considering a port of a really large project, I believe Fantom is the right choice, but I am quite scared!!! The community looks small and googling doesn't really show anything relevant... So, my question is: Is the lang mature enough? Will I find help if I need? How probable is it that I hit into something and get stuck? Do you offer commercial support for example? Do you recommend using Fantom in a real large production system?

Thanks in advance.

Why would you want to port a really large project to a new language? I can understand if you want to program new parts of the project in a better language but porting a large project is a huge investment and ou have to have a very good reason to do so.

Hi helium, Thanks for the quick reply... Most of the work in the project is in GWT, I am not porting these parts... The rest is the server backend along with some reports and some fairly straight forward pages were implemented in mono.. after the recent acquisition is obvious that I can't really trust mono that was already bugging me... so I want to port the backend... On antother hand, Fantom cross platform compatibility will be of nice useful uses within the project. So the ported parts are not that big... but they will be heavily used and in many environments... so I need it to be stable... and I need to be able to get help when I get stuck.. the port is currently feasible... but later it will a lot harder! Fantom really does look like a very good candidate... the only problem is that the community is small... and I am afraid of getting stuck somewhere... The platform is quite young but extremely promising.... So, is it a little early or what?

@ahhatem

Welcome to Fantom! Probably no right or wrong answer about whether Fantom is mature enough for your project, but I can offer my thoughts...

On the technology side, I think you will find the Fantom platform very robust and solid. This website has been running for years on Fantom. Our company ships production software built completely in Fantom. There is always bugs of course, but in general I think you will find the platform pretty rock solid.

If you do run into bugs, we tend to be pretty responsive. If there was truly a critical bug with no work arounds I would try to have a patch as soon as possible. Plus we do a full build about once a month and try to keep up with the ticket list (as far as bugs are concerned). Note we have not officially blessed things as "1.0" and locked everything down. So there might be minor breaking changes, although at this point, the bar is extremely high for any major breaking language changes.

Regarding community, you are right that the community is not huge. But I think the community we do have is very active and quite excellent. One of the advantages of a technology platform at this stage of its life cycle is that the community tends to be small, but interacts with a very high signal to noise ratio. By its very nature, developers attracted to a new platform like Fantom tend to be people who care deeply about programming languages, APIs, etc (versus the unwashed masses).

Hi Brian, First, congratulations... great lang and great platform... you have done an amazing job! Thanks for the response. Actually one of the things I liked about Fantom is that it is well designed and still under development, larger frameworks are harder to get involved... mono for example is very annoying to get involved in development, even installation is a process with lots of instructions to not break anything... I will be playing around for a while... until I get comfortable with Fantom then I will try to contribute and if things go well, I will probably go ahead and port the project.

It is a little early for this but While I am here, if I want to contribute where do I start?

Thank you.