I'm working on a couple games to play with some friends on my iPhone and other fancy smart phones. The idea is to create some simple web based games that we can play when we're supposed to be working and be able to play against each other. I'm starting simple with games like connect4 and such and will work my way up to more interesting games, like Hive or tanks maybe.
Anyways, since I'm cheap and only pay for a typical low budget web host to run my website(s) I think I'm going to end up doing the project(s) in PHP. It's been a while and at work I'm primarily Grails but Grails, while fast to develop in, is still quite heavy due to the JVM it requires. And many of our applications at work are quite small and while I could do them other ways, they usually require a resource hog (Tomcat). So I'm somewhat evaluating if we might be able to move some of our simpler development over to PHP.
After looking over some of the PHP frameworks to work in a similar fashion that I'm used to with Grails, I think I'm going to give CodeIgniter a try. It seems very light weight and a good fit for easy setup and quick and dirty coding, while still having some of the benefits of the application designs I'm used to.
I'm not sure if this is a wise move or not though since I'm not sure how valuable PHP is going to be in my skill set (vs say, Ruby and RoR). I've always had an appreciation for the minimal footprint of PHP, but never really got a chance to really get to know it. I think it might be some time before all the PHP folk and shared hosts make the switch to RoR but I definitely see it happening.
I might also go back to RoR but after learning Grails I didn't really like it as much (and had no real reason to pick it up further). The Groovy syntax was a very natural transition, although I continue to be frustrated from time to time with the development of Grails; it moves very quickly and has a tendency to break stuff you did no more than a few months ago. Once it stables out a bit more that will go away I believe. And the lack of mature plugins can be problematic sometimes. When you're trying to move quickly and you find out you actually have to build a plugin that doesn't exist or won't work for you, it just slows you down.
So, I might be asking some PHP questions in the near future on a few things until I get myself back up to speed again. It's been a few years since I've done anything more than modify my blog templates and such.
I'll let you guys know what I think of the framework after I get a little bit more familiar with it. But it looks pretty good so far.