Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

PHP in 2021

stitcher.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 309 posts

Re: PHP in 2021

#61

Post by [deleted] »

hokumguru wrote: post #33
insaneirish wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would say that Laravel is an extremely high quality framework (on par with and even in some ways better than Rails) that nobody should be ashamed to use. Never heard of Laravel. Decided to take a look. First thing the intro documentation says to do is install something called 'Docker Desktop'. I'm good, thanks. Why do I need Docker to play around with a web framework?

Because getting a modern version of PHP, postgres, and redis up and running isn’t necessarily easy for your average beginner.

[deleted]

Re: PHP in 2021

#62

Post by 40four »

gusbremm wrote: post #12

I wish there was a nodejs equivalent to Laravel

This is very surprising to me honestly. Yeah, folks have pointed out some of the big players, but none of them have really risen above the competition.

You would think NodeJS would have a clear cut dominant, monolithic web framework by now but there isn’t. Everyone seems to be happy to throw together hodge-podge Express apps.

Re: PHP in 2021

#63

Post by trog »

hokumguru wrote: post #33
insaneirish wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would say that Laravel is an extremely high quality framework (on par with and even in some ways better than Rails) that nobody should be ashamed to use. Never heard of Laravel. Decided to take a look. First thing the intro documentation says to do is install something called 'Docker Desktop'. I'm good, thanks. Why do I need Docker to play around with a web framework?

Because getting a modern version of PHP, postgres, and redis up and running isn’t necessarily easy for your average beginner.

Does docker make it easier or harder though?

I was testing out Apache Superset the other day and it recommends using Docker to do so. I am not strong in Docker - I prefer to run things from scratch so I know exactly what is going on under the hood - but thought I'd give it a go.

I had so many problems getting it going. Part of it was the Superset instructions were slightly obsolete, but mostly it was this same problem in this issue[1] from 2016, which was closed in 2017, which is still obviously an active issue for new Docker users.

It seems to be just a relatively simple Linux filesystem permissions issue (or at least, that is how I resolved it quickly, just to get it working), but it strikes me as bizarre that this kind of thing could not be resolved with a better installer or docs or something.

I then ran into problems with the application running under Docker not being able to access the database in the host OS. Again there are a zillion resources for resolving this, going back years, with many dead ends as it has changed so much since then.

There's this hugely upvoted solution[2] on Stack Overflow - which works for Docker, but Superset is launched through docker-compose, so straight away a new user has to figure out the differences.

In PHP on a fresh Linux box, you can be up and running and developing on Debian/Ubuntu with two or three apt-get commands, depending on whether you need a database server. Adding Docker into this mix just seems like it would unnecessarily complicate things.

All that said, I appreciate once you're over the learning curve of Docker, it's super useful. I am finding myself increasingly reaching for it as an option to container-ise some setups away from my current setup, which is basically bash-scripted install processes on fresh VMs.

Re: PHP in 2021

#64

Post by wnevets »

insaneirish wrote: post #30
busterarm wrote: post #2

PHP has been in a pretty good place since 7, IMO. These are some great developments. I would say that Laravel is an extremely high quality framework (on par with and even in some ways better than Rails) that nobody should be ashamed to use. It's unfortunate that the stink of old PHP is so powerful and that salaries are still lagging so far behind.

> I would say that Laravel is an extremely high quality framework (on par with and even in some ways better than Rails) that nobody should be ashamed to use. Never heard of Laravel. Decided to take a look. First thing the intro documentation says to do is install something called 'Docker Desktop'. I'm good, thanks. Why do I need Docker to play around with a web framework?

> Why do I need Docker to play around with a web framework?

PHP is server side, not frontend like React or Angular

Re: PHP in 2021

#65

Post by francislavoie »

astrange wrote: post #23
anw wrote: post #11

It's nice to see PHP adding useful things like enums and async (green threads). My foray into Web development started with Perl, but quickly segued into PHP with how much simpler it felt. The ability to hop into vim on your server (or use CPanel back in the day) and edit your site live was exciting back then – but now that very thought makes me shudder with what could go wrong, haha. While I've moved onto JVM languag…

What do they want async for? PHP's purpose is to run once to generate one HTTP response - they'd already forgotten this by inventing frameworks, but adding async seems to especially have forgotten this. PHP already had curl_multi_perform which is very useful for running child tasks, but I'm not sure you need much more than that.

Another use of async is to build other kinds of servers like websockets, which need to hold long-term connections. ReactPHP + Ratchet works great for that in PHP. Currently it works with an event loop (multiple implementations under the hood, like libev, libuv, etc) similarly to Node. Fibers should make the internals of ReactPHP better, but it'll barely change anything in userland.

Re: PHP in 2021

#66

Post by ashton314 »

Before you call me a troll, know that I worked with PHP for two+ years maintaining both legacy codebases and writing new code with Laravel.

My question is: why would anyone want to start something new with PHP in 2021? Is there anything that it does better than any other language/ecosystem? I feel like the community is full of (but not exclusively composed of—there are some gems like Caleb Porzio who write good stuff) people who just care about hacking something together and, as long as it works, it's fine. They care nothing about elegance and have but a dim conception of larger CS/SE principles.

For example, why would you write something in PHP when you've got an excellent choice between Ruby/Rails or Elixir/Phoenix/LiveView, both of which are fantastic, and, especially in the case of the Elixir/Phoenix stack, really developer friendly, easy to set up and deploy, etc. and also have solid foundations?

I'm glad to see PHP getting better—it will certainly improve life for those maintaining old PHP projects that are agile enough to upgrade—but I really see no reason to not choose a better tool in this day and age.

(You may now call me a troll if you see fit. I stand by what I said though. :-)

Re: PHP in 2021

#67

Post by solraph »

nine_k wrote: post #42
kijin wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hack might be better from a language design point of view, but most people outside of Facebook seem to have lost interest in it once PHP 7 caught up to it performance-wise.

With Hack's extensive static type checking and even contexts / coeffects, it's much more than just performance. The bigger your system grows, the more pain it removes. You still can mix it with plain PHP, much like you can mix TypeScript with plain JavaScript. I wish high-profile PHP projects, like Nextcloud, migrated to Hack eventually; it can be done piecemeal.

Ironically, Nextcloud is moving to Golang.

https://github.com/nextcloud/server/issues/16726

Re: PHP in 2021

#68

Post by theamk »

busterarm wrote: post #2

PHP has been in a pretty good place since 7, IMO. These are some great developments. I would say that Laravel is an extremely high quality framework (on par with and even in some ways better than Rails) that nobody should be ashamed to use. It's unfortunate that the stink of old PHP is so powerful and that salaries are still lagging so far behind.

That's because the "stink of old PHP" never really went away.

For example, Wordpress install guide [0] still talks about making your code directory writtable by web user -- practically guaranteed that any minute exploit will lead to permanent web shell.

So does Nextcloud install guide [1].

I am sure there are nice, modernPHP somewhere, but a lot of time you I see old-style programs with horrible security practices.

[0] https://wordpress.org/support/article/how-to-install-wordpre...

[1] https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/instal...

Re: PHP in 2021

#69

Post by mtnGoat »

astrange wrote: post #23
anw wrote: post #11

It's nice to see PHP adding useful things like enums and async (green threads). My foray into Web development started with Perl, but quickly segued into PHP with how much simpler it felt. The ability to hop into vim on your server (or use CPanel back in the day) and edit your site live was exciting back then – but now that very thought makes me shudder with what could go wrong, haha. While I've moved onto JVM languag…

What do they want async for? PHP's purpose is to run once to generate one HTTP response - they'd already forgotten this by inventing frameworks, but adding async seems to especially have forgotten this. PHP already had curl_multi_perform which is very useful for running child tasks, but I'm not sure you need much more than that.

Well that’s one purpose of php.

My workloads involve billions of php executions daily that have nothing to do with http or Apache or serving pages. Lambda and cli based jobs mainly.

PHP can do a lot of things if you stick with it and don’t jump to the next shiny object. Async helps with this.

Re: PHP in 2021

#70

Post by mtnGoat »

muglug wrote: post #43
chx wrote: post #5

In a post called "PHP in 2021" we really can't omit https://bref.sh/ -- it allows running PHP apps on AWS Lambda effortlessly. With all the serverless craze, it's a very important piece of the ecosystem. After writing PHP apps for two decades, I am absolutely stunned how easy it is. Amazon blogged about it at https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/the-serverless-lamp-sta...

FWIW Bref is cool, but it's AWS-only and still has a couple of orders of magnitude fewer daily installations than Laravel: https://packagist.org/packages/bref/bref/stats vs https://packagist.org/packages/laravel/framework/stats .

Not sure they are comparable as they serve very different needs.
Post reply on HN