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An Internet of PHP

timotijhof.net

61–70 of 333 posts

Re: An Internet of PHP

#61
PHP is a great web success story at so many levels. From massive sites like Wikipedia that have changed the world to the long tail of blogs and "Web 2" type decentralization.

Anecdotally I see also rude health: Wordpress already has an activitypub plugin whereas symphony based kbin is a very interesting proposition for a federated alternative to reddit that already sees traction. And Nextcloud is delivering data sovereignty and showing the way for personalized "clouds" here and now.

What is missing from PHP is really an easily communicable "story". Both at the technical level of the language and its tooling and at the community level and its vision.

This is not unique to PHP. Older ecosystems like C++ and Java, on which much of the world still runs, have a similar problem. But the singular web focus of PHP means it has more of chance to develop an attractive personna.

Its not easy but its very useful to have a very clear identity. Right now the tech world goes through an ML/AI fever (and associated nightmares) and a clear vision and purpose would, for example make it obvious how the PHP ecosystem fits into new developments and the broader client/server design.

Re: An Internet of PHP

#63
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like hating MS for putting ads in the OS? MS didn't change, they still exploit as much as they can. And they try to force people people into the cloud unable to secure their own software stack. MS didn't get better just because Google got worse.

Don't forget that now Microsoft ♥ Linux

[flagged]

Re: An Internet of PHP

#65
post #7

I've always liked PHP. You wouldn't pick it for your job interview's coding test if you had a choice (Python all the way there), but it's so intertwined with the internet and what we've learned about programming over the years. First mover advantage kind of deal. And I've never had to deal with ESM/CJS/AMD whatever module nonsense with PHP. No transpiling anything, just edit and refresh. And so many useful functions…

Bad rap comes from the inconsistency of the early APIs. The ability to interleave code and HTML was also tacky and never taken seriously but I think touted highly by some as a killer feature. The language is very unplanned, go look at an equality chart for PHP, it makes JavaScript blush as well.

I'd love to see a modern PHP without the language quirks and with a decent standard library.

Re: An Internet of PHP

#66
post #7

I've always liked PHP. You wouldn't pick it for your job interview's coding test if you had a choice (Python all the way there), but it's so intertwined with the internet and what we've learned about programming over the years. First mover advantage kind of deal. And I've never had to deal with ESM/CJS/AMD whatever module nonsense with PHP. No transpiling anything, just edit and refresh. And so many useful functions…

Bad rap comes from the inconsistency of the early APIs. The ability to interleave code and HTML was also tacky and never taken seriously but I think touted highly by some as a killer feature. The language is very unplanned, go look at an equality chart for PHP, it makes JavaScript blush as well.

> The ability to interleave code and HTML was also tacky and never taken seriously but I think touted highly by some as a killer feature.

And yet people seem to keep inventing variations of this as "templating" languages.

Re: An Internet of PHP

#69

I like PHP, one issue which I face with PHP though is, that it is difficult to create a self-contained docker image. With node.js or java spring boot i can build an application with an http endpoint and create a single docker image with all included easily. With php I need 2 distinct containers, e.g., nginx, php-fpm and the code mounted on a volume to the the containers. So it seems to be more difficult for setup and…

You can't have nginx and php in the same container?

Re: An Internet of PHP

#70

I like PHP, one issue which I face with PHP though is, that it is difficult to create a self-contained docker image. With node.js or java spring boot i can build an application with an http endpoint and create a single docker image with all included easily. With php I need 2 distinct containers, e.g., nginx, php-fpm and the code mounted on a volume to the the containers. So it seems to be more difficult for setup and…

Well, at least in the past you could have run apache with mod_php. And the php files should also integrateable into the image.
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