Back in the day, PHP was a great tool for getting a site up quickly.
Then Ruby on Rails took off in 2006 and took the lead.
It was the "batteries included" of web frameworks.
You could build a CRUD app very quickly.
Many other language frameworks followed and evolved.
It is almost 2018.
What do you think is the best tech for a web app these days?
Here are some features I could quickly think of:
* basic HTTP handling
* good security
* i18n/translation
* ORM/persistence system
* a built-in user/authentication system
* a built-in admin UI
* a migration system for db schema changes
* easy REST (gRPC, etc) API construction
* good form/model validation
* a type system for the language
* websocket support
I am interested in hearing the HN opinions on this.
What do you think?
PHP was a great tool back in the day and today!
PHP with a decent framework like Laravel [1] or Zend Framework [2] really works well and addresses all the features that you have listed (except the last 2).
Uniquely among modern languages, * PHP was born in a web server *. Its strengths are tightly coupled to the context of request-oriented, server-side execution.
We've managed to develop several complex apps over the last 10 years on PHP. For Web Socket support, we use Socket.IO or Firebase and it both really well together with PHP.
If you choose PHP now, you are not alone. Many companies still choose PHP for their Web Application. Slack uses PHP for most of its server-side application logic [3]
[1] https://laravel.com/ [2] https://framework.zend.com/ [3] https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously-cf7a60065329