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Comment by alistproducer2 | Hacker News Reader

I work at a large company and we are starting to branch out into other languages. the problem is most of our infrastructure in .NET. Something like this would be really cool as it would allow us to utilize PHP while not asking too much of infrastructure team. I might put in an OSS approval request for this.

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I think you might be the first case I've heard of of someone wanting to go from .NET to PHP.

Most of my work in the past few years has been migrating .NET projects to PHP for enterprise clients. Especially with PHP 7, the performance is good, it's easier to hire for, and the total cost of ownership is lower. The doomsayers predicting poor security are wrong - it is just as possible to build a secure PHP system as a secure .NET system, and just as easy to build an insecure one.

Of course, it depends on the project and the company, so this isn't a universal truth. But there are definitely a lot of companies out there spending a fortune on a .NET stack that are looking to move to a PHP open source stack for good reasons.

Not sure that's true. Out of the box ASP.NET has request validation enabled by default that screens out lots of opportunities for XSS https://www.owasp.org/index.php/ASP.NET_Request_Validation PHP doesn't have that for example.

> PHP doesn't have that for example.

Bare PHP, sure, but pick basically any framework that any modern PHP-based web app is built on and then it does, no?

Symfony certainly offers it.

I'm a bit new to .Net but doesn't the shift to .Net Core hosted on Linux and compatible with MySQL/PostgreSQL address all these concerns?

We literally spend millions on licensing Share Point to do what WordPress can do much better and easier. I'm not saying we're going to start writing everything in PHP, but being able to experiment with WP could affect the bottom line in a big way.

It might be a personal thing, but if I had to choose between working for a customer A with SharePoint and customer B with WP, I wouldn't hesitate to choose customer A, even with SharePoint 2007.

May I ask why?

PHP and the overall quality of average WP code?

Honestly, I think I'll take 'average' php code over 'average' .NET code, I just did a 18 mo. stint at a .NET enterprise environment after 8+ yrs of PHP(Drupal, so maybe the bar is higher, not saying it is, but maybe).

I don't have any substantive evidence for this, but I suspect you'd see very different characteristics among people who work on SharePoint and, say, MVC/WebAPI.

Vastly. People who develop sharepoint tend business focused people or ex IT people.

People who develop in MVC tend to be developers.

That explains why all the information you can find about SharePoint development is so muddled I guess.

I started out as a PHP web developer and started developing in .NET when it was released. At this stage, I've been developing applications in .NET for 15 years. Whenever I have to look at a PHP project or ASP classic project, the code quality is usually much worse than other languages. ASP and PHP make it really, really easy to do things wrong.

How can that be any worse than the average quality of sharepoint code?

Static typing and C# disallow many of the typical PHP code patterns I have seen in the wild.

There are a lot of creative ways around strict typing in c#, I spend my days dealing with them. I just finished working on a section that managed to combine the speed of c# with the expressiveness of assembly...

I would look at sitecore. It's still .net, but it is closer to wordpress in that you wouldn't necessarily build a sharepoint in it, but you can build pretty much anything else in it.

Disclaimer, I work on the UX/UI side of a company that focuses solely on sitecore.

I only had a project with Sitecore, v6.5 at the time, and really enjoyed using it.

Just the overall replication of Windows desktop for the backend management UI seemed a bit extreme. :)

Yeah it was a bit odd for me too, coming from PHP and node land. Most of the editing should be done in the experience editor.. which is fairly WYSIWYG in context editing. Concrete5 still does that part of it better. Sitecore has a lot of engagement value scoring and content a/b testing built into it.

Thanks for sharing this, but what exactly does this provide that WP doesn't to justify the cost?

I'm not familiar with the product, but surely leveraging existing expertise has some value.

I'm rewriting a legacy ASP application to PHP right now, and this isn't my first. Though the code is not .NET, .NET was the obvious upgrade path yet it was decided that moving to PHP was preferable for a variety of reasons. You already know the non-technical reasons (inexpensive Linux servers, easy to find devs, MySQL licensing vs MS SQL Server licensing, etc) but PHP 7 is extraordinarily performant and (as a VIM user I cannot believe that I'm saying this) with a good IDE such as PhpStorm it is an absolute pleasure to write and maintain.

Being able to use PHP for templating on .NET would be really nice. Webforms suck. Razor is okay, but the syntax isn't as easy for non-programmers to understand.

Agreed. It's usually the opposite, especially in enterprise. People on HN get in their bubbles and forget that most large businesses use Windows.

This is on .NET Core, so you can actually run this anywhere! I do a lot of Core development on a Mac, but it runs well on AWS/Linux/my toaster.

Weird times, huh?

Speaking of toasters, https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/6d1e688cb2bd37121c7de... :)

Out of curiosity, why do you use .NET? (Assuming you use Mac/AWS/etc because you like them)

Not the person you asked but I also develop .NET Core on a mac. I like .NET because I can use C# which is my favourite language, and the new ASP.NET Core framework is very clean, modern and straight to the point. There's very little magic and it's performant and productive.

Dapper for data access is also fantastic for the same reasons.

For me, it's because I love C# (and F#, which I'm still learning).

Because C# is awesome. The most intuitive OO language I have ever used.

That makes it sound like 'people on HN' are trapped in some sort of enterprise-proof foam. Which is unlikely.

I laughed at that. As much as I still shun MS platforms, I have never heard anything good about PHP as a language other than "it worked and was available at the time". Why someone would migrate in this direction is beyond me ;-) but that's just my opinion of course.

Critical mass, availability of developers, good documentation, free. There are many reasons why people pick one technology over another.

Or "facebook uses it". That one tends to go far.

Didn't they start with it and migrate away?

They use something called HHVM, which is a PHP compiler.

http://hhvm.com/

And Hack, their language for HHVM that's basically "static types bolted on to PHP".

http://hacklang.org

An aptly named language if there ever was one.

Hack is more than that. Hack solves every little stupid mistake PHP has as a language. It is a good language developed by smart people, has rules to avoid pitfalls and rules to make things more certain. It retains only the syntax of PHP, but in strict mode, hack can be compared to any other good language.

Aren't C# devs at least as easy to find as php devs already? This would vary regionally I suppose. I'd worry about the future availability of php devs if node/.NET keep growing as open source web backend platforms.

And .NET is as free as php?

Not in places where wages are low.

Cheap for employers is what i'm hearing, but isn't really an incentive for an employee..

It is for employees in countries where there are few or no alternatives.

I would suggest a number of other languages you could consider that are better languages than PHP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CLI_languages

I think "better" in this case is relative.

Yes, there are objectively better languages than PHP in terms of design and consistency, but even I'll admit it's difficult to match the shear volume of FOSS libraries, applications, and the huge number of people who know it if you're targeting the web.

Besides, if Peachpie expands the .NET ecosystem to include PHP's, isn't that a win for developers who may be stuck with that platform? I'm not a .NET developer, so I'm sure to be missing something here.

Yet half the web runs PHP. Why? PHP offers good functionality out of the box. Unlike these languages where you will need a hundred-thousand dependencies to build a cms. That is also why porting PHP to .net is not as simple as porting any of these.

Even more than half. Over 80%: https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programmin...

Err, deploying PHP on IIS is actually very basic.

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