is it healthy to built a web services or a web app using EE?

Question

we are growing company and we support and use EE for more than 4 years and continues, because we believe in it, and it is our choice ever.

Any ways, I was in interesting discussion with a developer about how healthy & good enough is it to use ExpressionEngine for web services, web apps, cloud services, dating website or CRM for public such as paid services etc... and that will be our development methodology in our business so every one has the same level experience to make faster development.

But his opinions about using EE are

1. It works only for small projects such as blog or website.
2. custom development in EE is wasting of time.
3. We will get bad performance with database Inflation.
4. it uses MYSIM mysql engine.
5. it dose not support other data bases.
6. it is better to built application with custom development using php framework such as laravel, or zend because it is faster and more solid.
7. it has no powerful permission system.
8. you should keep it as CMS nothing else.
9. Don't put all the eggs at one basket. EllisLab won't be here for every

My opinions are:

1. it is better way to develop custom forms and fast way to implement design.
2. I think Custom development with EE is easy because the learn is short with Grate documentation.
3. it is easy to develop and custom your work online using (control panel).
4. you can use built your backend for your end users as backend using Channel:forms.
5. it has many many tools and embedded features starting from login and security ends to Word Censoring, so you wont need to reinvent the wheel.
6. it may wont safe time but it is a solid framework and has allot of add-ons to extend.
7. ExpressionEngine will work will with the good hardware and well configured servers.
8. accountability for the project ( if I lose my programmer I will find someone to help), ellislab support.
9. I have experience with 2 web services both are walking without a limping .

After all, we did not come out with any result So I thought about asking the experts. am i overestimate of expressionEngine value? or just he is right. your honest will help us to set some rules :) thanks for advance in helping

Answer 1

It's really a matter of "it depends"

There are a lot of factors that can help you determine whether EE is good as a long-term platform for a site, so there's no clear answer.

You have to look at what you expect your architecture to be like and determine how much bending of EE it will take to make it work. In some cases, it works just perfectly, in others, it's much easier to build on a framework instead. So I would suggest you look into how much customization it really needs.

Answer 2

The real value/power of EE is in the control panel, and how quickly you can pull together complex data-driven sites by not having to build an admin interface. I'm currently building a mobile app that uses a combination of Meteor and EE, and the real reason I opted for EE as a back-end solution is because it would save weeks of work using what EE does natively. With some caching you can output JSON data lightning fast.

Also, you can now operate a pretty decent CRUD API from EE: http://putyourlightson.net/open-api.

It's not a perfect solution for every scenario, but if you're already using it I've found you can achieve things much faster than by building admin interfaces from scratch.