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Comment by ryan-allen | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the sentiment but I don't agree with the language/runtime that is PHP.

There are many, many more superior options when it comes to general purpose 'no-framework' styles.

PHP is a html template engine, so using it to create an API sounds like "The wrong way" by definition. I think you actually need these frameworks in PHP to turn it into something other than a template engine. They recompile your code, change the way it is loaded and accessed via HTTP, it's a whole different way to use the language and runtime.

I am a fan of Symfony and Drupal 8 because of these abstractions. They can provide a powerful toolset you can build off of. Granted you take the time to understand it.

Is there anything easier to get started with than PHP? Turn on Apache's mod_php (or Nginx and php-fpm which is a little more work) and browse to a directory.

Is there another programming language one can use for web development without a framework? Genuine question, I always thought that's PHP only advantage.

Go? The standard library has all relevant web-related features covered, but it's not a framework that forces you to organize your code in a certain way...

I guess anyhting that can read environment variables and write to stdout. :)

Exactly, CGI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface) was a thing once.

It's still a thing. For example with cgit.

Interesting. Well, that just shows how much I still have to learn. xD Thanks.

ASP (the original version) and JSP are probably what you're looking for, although they're probably worse overall for this kind of thing compared to PHP.

Now, most of the application servers that implement JSP will implement at least a big chunk of some version of Java EE, but you don't really have to use most of it.

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