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#1 reason the article doesn't mention: It's incredibly cheap to host PHP. Hosting companies push WordPress and other PHP-based hosting heavily and make it super

#1 reason the article doesn't mention: It's incredibly cheap to host PHP. Hosting companies push WordPress and other PHP-based hosting heavily and make it super easy for anyone to get a live site going with PHP. Last time I launched a node app, it took me a full day of messing about in AWS. Last time I launched a PHP app, it took me less than a half hour at Siteground.

clubminsk 9y ago
exactly!
moomin 9y ago
TBH, PHP is viable for pretty much exactly as long as Wordpress survives and uses it. If that changed, I wouldn't fancy PHPs chances.
- Daishiman 9y ago
  The vast majority of web sites run PHP for better or worse and that code ain't going nowhere. The performance characteristics of Node are completely irrelevant for most sites. The developments model's inherent complexity and the moving target, however, matters very much.
  - camus2 9y ago
    > The vast majority of web sites run PHP for better or worse and that code ain't going nowhere. The vast majority of blogs that are build in Wordpress. Remove all the blogs and corporate websites and I bet that's not the case anymore.
    - Daishiman 9y ago
      You're saying that as if blogs and corporate websites weren't a humongous proportion of the internet. And no, there's some pretty big, modern sites like Mailchimp which run on PHP. There's literally no reason to use Node if you already have an effective backend with PHP because Node doesn't really bring anything new on the table, but it does bring along its own class of issues.
      - camus2 9y ago
        > because Node doesn't really bring anything new on the table You can't write a production grade web socket server in PHP. and no ReactPHP isn't my definition of production grade. If your app is real time you just can't use PHP for that. So yes, Node brings something new to the table.
        Daishiman 9y ago
        Which is trivially compartmentalized through a Node proxy server that takes up at most 1000 lines of code. Nobody's throwing out their code for that.
        camus2 9y ago
        > Which is trivially compartmentalized through a Node proxy server that takes up at most 1000 lines of code. Nobody's throwing out their code for that. You just said, Node brought nothing new to the table, obviously you were wrong.
- paulgrimes1 9y ago
  I disagree. I've been using PHP for about eleven years now, even since the bad old days of PHP3, and I have never used, and generally advise against using, wordpress. PHP will be around long after wordpress. I do concede that if PHP went away, WP would somehow survive, like some kind of post-nuclear cockroach.
  - exclusiv 9y ago
    I'm in the same boat. I cranked a lot of things out with CodeIgniter back in the day. Expression Engine is superior to WordPress but if you like either I'd suggest Craft CMS now and moving forward. For general apps, I use Laravel or Lumen. And React PHP for scraping. And don't forget The League [1]. Lots of great PHP stuff out there. [1] https://thephpleague.com https://thephpleague.com
helenakyso 9y ago
Try now (https://zeit.co/now https://zeit.co/now), I use it and it is very easy to deploy a node.js app. You literally just type `now` in your terminal.
- vec 9y ago
  > in your terminal You just lost a nontrivial percentage of PHP developers. Far and away the most compelling feature of PHP for a lot of their target audience is that the deploy model is "unzip this file in that folder". If I want to host my own web site but I don't want to "learn to program" there is no alternative.
  - merb 9y ago
    > unzip this file in that folder it's more like "copy these files via ftp to this host" (p.s. that also includes your config.php with plain text passwords of course)
    - anshumanravi 9y ago
      A lot of things happened in php world,since you last checked, which is apparently ~ 5 years back. for starters go read about Magento 2 codebase and its code organization and deployment strategy. Whether you do FTP based file deployment or sophisticated CI/CD build, it all depends on developer not programming language you are using.
    - vec 9y ago
      Well, yeah. Point being that if I'm used to working with .doc and .xls files there's next to zero new skills I have to learn and nothing that really pulls me out of my comfort zone. I just have to install a text editor ("like Word, but for .php files") and an FTP client ("type this magic string to set it up, then it's just a funny looking file browser") and I'm off to the races.
    - wolfgang42 9y ago
      The problem with the "copy these files" approach, even more than dealing with FTP, is that the upgrade process winds up being "copy these files, but be careful not to overwrite any changes you made". Applications like WordPress or Piwik come with a self-updater, but then you wind up with having to fiddle with the permissions to let the application overwrite itself. I got fed up with this a few years ago and started building http://bitmash.io http://bitmash.io (yes, shameless plug) which does some fancy filesystem manipulation to swap out the application's files during upgrades while otherwise looking like a perfectly ordinary PHP hosting provider. While I'm proud of this solution it still seems rather silly to have to jump through these sorts of hoops to handle deploys.

clubminsk 9y ago

exactly!

moomin 9y ago

TBH, PHP is viable for pretty much exactly as long as Wordpress survives and uses it. If that changed, I wouldn't fancy PHPs chances.

Daishiman 9y ago
The vast majority of web sites run PHP for better or worse and that code ain't going nowhere. The performance characteristics of Node are completely irrelevant for most sites. The developments model's inherent complexity and the moving target, however, matters very much.
- camus2 9y ago
  > The vast majority of web sites run PHP for better or worse and that code ain't going nowhere. The vast majority of blogs that are build in Wordpress. Remove all the blogs and corporate websites and I bet that's not the case anymore.
  - Daishiman 9y ago
    You're saying that as if blogs and corporate websites weren't a humongous proportion of the internet. And no, there's some pretty big, modern sites like Mailchimp which run on PHP. There's literally no reason to use Node if you already have an effective backend with PHP because Node doesn't really bring anything new on the table, but it does bring along its own class of issues.
    - camus2 9y ago
      > because Node doesn't really bring anything new on the table You can't write a production grade web socket server in PHP. and no ReactPHP isn't my definition of production grade. If your app is real time you just can't use PHP for that. So yes, Node brings something new to the table.
      - Daishiman 9y ago
        Which is trivially compartmentalized through a Node proxy server that takes up at most 1000 lines of code. Nobody's throwing out their code for that.
        camus2 9y ago
        > Which is trivially compartmentalized through a Node proxy server that takes up at most 1000 lines of code. Nobody's throwing out their code for that. You just said, Node brought nothing new to the table, obviously you were wrong.
paulgrimes1 9y ago
I disagree. I've been using PHP for about eleven years now, even since the bad old days of PHP3, and I have never used, and generally advise against using, wordpress. PHP will be around long after wordpress. I do concede that if PHP went away, WP would somehow survive, like some kind of post-nuclear cockroach.
- exclusiv 9y ago
  I'm in the same boat. I cranked a lot of things out with CodeIgniter back in the day. Expression Engine is superior to WordPress but if you like either I'd suggest Craft CMS now and moving forward. For general apps, I use Laravel or Lumen. And React PHP for scraping. And don't forget The League [1]. Lots of great PHP stuff out there. [1] https://thephpleague.com https://thephpleague.com

helenakyso 9y ago

Try now (https://zeit.co/now https://zeit.co/now), I use it and it is very easy to deploy a node.js app. You literally just type `now` in your terminal.

vec 9y ago
> in your terminal You just lost a nontrivial percentage of PHP developers. Far and away the most compelling feature of PHP for a lot of their target audience is that the deploy model is "unzip this file in that folder". If I want to host my own web site but I don't want to "learn to program" there is no alternative.
- merb 9y ago
  > unzip this file in that folder it's more like "copy these files via ftp to this host" (p.s. that also includes your config.php with plain text passwords of course)
  - anshumanravi 9y ago
    A lot of things happened in php world,since you last checked, which is apparently ~ 5 years back. for starters go read about Magento 2 codebase and its code organization and deployment strategy. Whether you do FTP based file deployment or sophisticated CI/CD build, it all depends on developer not programming language you are using.
  - vec 9y ago
    Well, yeah. Point being that if I'm used to working with .doc and .xls files there's next to zero new skills I have to learn and nothing that really pulls me out of my comfort zone. I just have to install a text editor ("like Word, but for .php files") and an FTP client ("type this magic string to set it up, then it's just a funny looking file browser") and I'm off to the races.
  - wolfgang42 9y ago
    The problem with the "copy these files" approach, even more than dealing with FTP, is that the upgrade process winds up being "copy these files, but be careful not to overwrite any changes you made". Applications like WordPress or Piwik come with a self-updater, but then you wind up with having to fiddle with the permissions to let the application overwrite itself. I got fed up with this a few years ago and started building http://bitmash.io http://bitmash.io (yes, shameless plug) which does some fancy filesystem manipulation to swap out the application's files during upgrades while otherwise looking like a perfectly ordinary PHP hosting provider. While I'm proud of this solution it still seems rather silly to have to jump through these sorts of hoops to handle deploys.