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Comment by arexxbifs | Hacker News Reader

> Try to build a complex server-rendered web app with PHP because "It's more inclusive" or "it has better frontend performance". See you in 2030.

Like Facebook, WordPress and MediaWiki? Bashing PHP is a popular pastime, but front-end performance and inclusion are not to be scoffed at. Especially not if your target audience has a different standard of living than that of a major European city.

Personally, I'm much more worried about optimizing heavily third-party dependent front-end code to perform well on old laptops and cheap phones than I am with scaling up and load balancing a server-rendered site.

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> Like Facebook, WordPress and MediaWiki?

Yes, exactly. Facebook, Wordpress, and even MediaWiki have had man-centuries put into them.

If you want a polished result in less time, you should consider a different approach than server-rendered PHP for everything.

Of course they've had lots of man-time poured into them: they've existed for a long time. But there were first versions of all of those, too, and first versions of tonnes of other complex server-rendered sites and apps.

Mocking inclusion and front-end performance is quite contradictory to "Use The Right Tool". There are several cases where server-side rendering has a place and there are several frameworks and approaches that help with the complexity, just like there are cases when client-side interactivity is a better choice and you can pick a framework that will help with performance and cross-browser issues - and complexity, which exists on the client side as well.

And no ones builds webapps in plain PHP anymore... there are high-quality modern frameworks like Symfony or Laravel with dependency injection, unit tests, template engines, etc.

Tons of folks build apps in plain PHP, more so than use frameworks

Well yes, like all of them. It's just that building complex apps with a lot of interactions gets messy super quickly when you render everything on the server. It brings a lot of limitations that are hard to deal with.

yeah. he lost me with that.

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