51–60 of 176 posts
It’s hard to explain just how much easier PHP made creating a dynamic web site back in the 90s / early 00s. You drop a file in your public web server folder and you’re done. Prior was CGI Perl scripts that hacked together how to access session and rest data. Or you had to develop in C. PHP had native support for the web. It also eliminate the need for an app server. I’m still not certain even today, if anything exist…
In some ways, that incredible ease of use of PHP for backend mirrored the ease of use of Macromedia Flash for animators and front-end/UX designers, which also led to a generation of middle schoolers and high schoolers tinkering and learning from each other and accidentally falling into a real career path.
Thank you Rasmus and PHP team... despite all the warts PHP gets often-deserved flack for, you have undoubtedly changed the lives of, quite possibly, hundreds of thousands of people who would never have become professional developers without the easy on-ramp that your creation provided.
I haven’t used PHP in years, but Laravel was such a fun and productive framework to work in. It really has a way of making you feel like a “code artisan”, something I typically only hear coming from Rails developers. In contrast, every Node app I’ve worked on has felt somewhat amateur, even if the code was high quality.
1) Django
2) Rails
3) Cake
... BIG GAP ...
4) Node.js (Express)
Looking at this page I beleive I can still make a pretty decent website backend using vanilla php (including authentication) and a nice front end using plain old html and javascript from so many years ago.
It’s hard to explain just how much easier PHP made creating a dynamic web site back in the 90s / early 00s. You drop a file in your public web server folder and you’re done. Prior was CGI Perl scripts that hacked together how to access session and rest data. Or you had to develop in C. PHP had native support for the web. It also eliminate the need for an app server. I’m still not certain even today, if anything exist…
This is right when I started using it and it launched my career in software dev. You could build anything. Combine that with being 21-22 and the associated naivité and nothing was impossible. Prior to PHP as part of a LAMP stack, I had indeed been cobbling Perl scripts and GDBM key/pair databases to do web apps for various projects and customers. The ability to just print to the browser with PHP without explicitly ha…
It’s hard to explain just how much easier PHP made creating a dynamic web site back in the 90s / early 00s. You drop a file in your public web server folder and you’re done. Prior was CGI Perl scripts that hacked together how to access session and rest data. Or you had to develop in C. PHP had native support for the web. It also eliminate the need for an app server. I’m still not certain even today, if anything exist…
It basically did for simple web programming what visual basic did for Windows desktop toys: allowed you to throw some UI together (drag & drop components in the VB case, any old HTML with links or forms for PHP) then start stringing bit of code in haphazardly to link it together. No need to learn a more complex compiler or other build tools, worry about configuring CGI or other web server tech (unless running PHP you…
It’s hard to explain just how much easier PHP made creating a dynamic web site back in the 90s / early 00s. You drop a file in your public web server folder and you’re done. Prior was CGI Perl scripts that hacked together how to access session and rest data. Or you had to develop in C. PHP had native support for the web. It also eliminate the need for an app server. I’m still not certain even today, if anything exist…
Definitely. I started with PHP when I was only 12 or 13 years old. Adding some logic inside your .html files (mostly includes, that were like magic back then[1]), renaming to .php and upload them to the server using FTP was so simple. A few years later, when I had to set up a lot of things to run Django I was surprised at how hard it was. PHP was simple to use, and to understand its logic, because it was embeded into…
It’s hard to explain just how much easier PHP made creating a dynamic web site back in the 90s / early 00s. You drop a file in your public web server folder and you’re done. Prior was CGI Perl scripts that hacked together how to access session and rest data. Or you had to develop in C. PHP had native support for the web. It also eliminate the need for an app server. I’m still not certain even today, if anything exist…
Try nextjs.
> This may sound a little foreign to all you folks coming from a non-Unix background, but PHP doesn't cost anything. You can use it for commercial and/or non-commercial use all you want. You can give it to your friends, print it out and hang it on your wall or eat it for lunch. Welcome to the world of Open Source software! Smile, be happy, the world is good. For the full legalese, see the official license. What a nic…
I guess you are lacking some context. Back in the day, you could: * Be bold enough to use Linux or FreeBSD and use CGI or Perl as the only free version * Use ASP but pay license fees for Windows NT, ISS and SQL Server * Use ColdFusion which was kind of trendy but was pretty expensive. When PHP arrived it was so refreshing. I used to make my stuff in Apache+PHP, MySQL and Linux and it was magical what you could do wit…
It’s hard to explain just how much easier PHP made creating a dynamic web site back in the 90s / early 00s. You drop a file in your public web server folder and you’re done. Prior was CGI Perl scripts that hacked together how to access session and rest data. Or you had to develop in C. PHP had native support for the web. It also eliminate the need for an app server. I’m still not certain even today, if anything exist…
It basically did for simple web programming what visual basic did for Windows desktop toys: allowed you to throw some UI together (drag & drop components in the VB case, any old HTML with links or forms for PHP) then start stringing bit of code in haphazardly to link it together. No need to learn a more complex compiler or other build tools, worry about configuring CGI or other web server tech (unless running PHP you…
I also just trashed an extremely repugnant PDF template processor, first with fpdf.org, then with tcpdf.org - far from perfect, but improvement a thousand fold.
Exaggerate, you say? Can I interest you in COBOL on my VAX (I'm not kidding)? Or perhaps (is this is too new-fangled) assembler under EXEC-8 on OS2200?
I do like the PHP solutions very much, and yes, I work in a museum.