I am an app founder who used a brick and mortar developer - they used CakePHP as the app language. Now I’m stuck trying to find a developer to finish it off after their quote blew out to triple the $$ and taking three years (not joking) and still not done. The app is live on iOS and Android but has some glitches due to them using student developers and a framework that was their own IP. I’m at the point where I am looking at either letting it fold, pulling the plug on AWS and getting a supermarket job until I retire, or potentially finding a competent developer to take an equity share in exchange for getting it to a saleable state - it’s pretty close in my opinion, but when I tried to hand over to a second party dev they spent 5 months determining the LAMP back end needed to be rebuilt because they couldn’t work it out. I don’t know it they’re incompetent or the code is shite…
I was looking for potentially someone who might be interested in an equity share of the company in exchange for finishing off the app, but I’m told I have very little chance of finding such a person (Stack Overflow advice)
So instead, I’m looking for an expert in Cake PHP and LAMP to review the code I have and tell me with impartiality, whether the code I have is even worth continuing with, or have I been sold an unusable /unstable application.
I will of course need someone with proven skill and authenticity willing to provide work examples and sign an NDA before opening up the code repository. I can pay, but literally running on empty, so I don’t have a large budget unfortunately.
2.4.0 is from August 2013. Three years ago, 2.4.0 was 5 years old, 2.10.11 was the latest in the v2 line, and v3 was already up to 3.6.7. v3 has been around since 2015. I don’t believe that 2.4.0 will run on PHP7 at all? They never should have started with 2.4. I would very much not be trusting the expertise of somebody using a version so very far out of date. So I hate the be the bearer of bad news, but it’s quite likely that what you’ve got there is an unusable application.
There certainly is a way, whether it’s feasible is a different question, it really depends on the application code, whether it’s properly covered by tests, whether they possibly used a modified core, etc.
Updating to the latest 2.x and a somewhat modern LAMP stack might be relatively easy, but then again 2.x is still EOL, so sinking time in that might not be sensible from that perspective alone, and instead an upgrade to 3.x or 4.x (depending on which one is going to become the next LTS) could be warranted, which might turn into a larger rewrite.
Unless you’ve been basically scammed out of 150k, I’d expect a rather complex application for that kind of money, one that requires continued maintenance by professional developers - someone will have to take a good look at it. I’d suggest that you hit up the people at CakeDC and get a quote for a code review to get things started. There’s always a chance that the required fixes are rather simple, leaving you with the opportunity to slowly upgrade while operation continues.
Thank you, that’s really insightful advice. They have created an app for me that more or less works, so you’d think there would be no point in deliberately creating crap code that could damage their reputation as developers …? Incompetence? The AWS build has nine instances … that’s a whole lot of work on old code … I’m just at a loss as to why they did it. I don’t believe it’s that complex an app.
Well, that’s anyone’s guess. We don’t know what happened over the last 3 years, we don’t know the contracts, the functional specifications, etc. For all anyone of us outsiders know, it could be anything from basic misunderstandings, to incompetence, to sheer despair.
Three years ago, 2.4.0 was 5 years old, 2.10.11 was the latest in the v2 line, and v3 was already up to 3.6.7. v3 has been around since 2015. I don’t believe that 2.4.0 will run on PHP7 at all? They never should have started with 2.4. I would very much not be trusting the expertise of somebody using a version so very far out of date. So I hate the be the bearer of bad news, but it’s quite likely that what you’ve got there is an unusable application.