Go with PHP

Replacing PHP/Laveral with JAVA/SpringBoot is not different at all.

A great many good things that I still use on a daily basis are written in php. Roundcube and Nextcloud for starters.

Some of the most fun I ever had writing basic CRUD apps and simple interactive websites was in PHP and Codeigniter back in the day. I'm pretty much Team Python now just because of the huge ecosystem but maybe it's time to give PHP another chance...

Thus is why I wish titles quoted names, at least where is there is any possibility of confusion

As a fullstack developer who has worked many, many years in the javascript hellhole, I mean ecosystem, as well as the python ecosystem and .NET; coming back to PHP the last 2 years, working essentially in Laravel and the like - I couldn't approve more of this message.

Seriously, PHP is the grand father that will drive you to class and you'll never be late, the car will never smell and everything will always just be fine.

It's fast, it's typed (now), it's reliable.

Laravel is pretty darn rock solid. I've used a LOT of frameworks. Most of them fall on their ass in either the documentation or performance scope. Laravel is beasty, reasonably well documented, handles hundreds of thousands of users without a scratch. Plays well with Redis and MariaDB or anything really.

Just ignore the fugly standard library inconsistencies of (old) PHP, every language has their toilet corner...

Oh and it's free. All of it. PHP, Laravel. And its hosting has always been the cheapest. You don't need a particular OS or certain cloud providers.

When I consider the solutions of flask and microservices I've left behind, the many node processes running with pm2, the complexity of .NET solutions... PHP just works, and it's easy to make reliable... And if it's slow, it's because I'm doing dumb stuff, not because of dark corner edge case I happened to be tripping into.

It's single threaded first, queue jobs for anything slower. That simple facts make it so much easier to reason about things, and keeps the fullstack linear, transactional and easy to reason about, 2 years into it.

PHP is not the best language in the world. I prefer Swift and even Go for many reasons, but it's an easy, simple, straightforward language. It's the BMX of the languages.

I think its a great reminder to code with whatever you feel comfortable. For example, my last project I did in Centos/Apache/PHP5/Code Igniter 3.1 with some WASP for protection I did for 12 years and sold few months ago. It checks out against Qualys Server test and ImmuniWeb very well. I sold it for close to $10MM with annual revenues of $1.6MM. The last question the new owner asked me was "what did you program it with?". They mostly want bunch of boring excel spreadsheets seeing where I am, how the sales are sustained, and how do I believe it can grow. On the final day, their IT guy showed up. He looked in silence through 45 minutes of my code's presentation, which is very much mix of OO and not OO, and his only words were "I don't like frameworks if that was me I would start the whole thing from scratch".

So you never know what or whom you gonna get, but the bottom line is if you have sales and revenues and keep tabs on spending, they will come, and they will not care less about your fancy framework or newest code implementations.

TLDR: code in whatever you feel comfortable but always consider security as top priority (not speed) because in production your code's/setup security mistakes can cost you serious legal troubles.