About optional JS: you can have that with server-side rendering plus a modern framework (like next.js or leptos). That's certainly not as simple as vanilla html and js, but totally doable.
yes, we use PHP for this which is much simpler to grasp than JS-SSR
If you just want a few pages, no need for background workers or database migrations, PHP is still the king. You download one of many single-executable LAMP servers, and start writing your index.php. Deploy? Just copy files to server. Zero downtime deploy? Copy files to server and use symlink to atomically switch versions. Dependencies? Composer (package manager) is a single-file script, you can place it wherever. Pain only begins when you want to break away from file-based routing, or need custom .htaccess and nginx.conf, or want to isolate components, or need Redis and cron for background jobs.
On NextJS side, I knew a few people who wanted to start their career with it and the experience wasn't smooth. You install nodejs... but your distribution only ships Node 12, so everything is failing with cryptic errors. You search how to upgrade Node, and get caught in nvm vs n vs asdf flamewars. Once you found a working solution (which probably required you to edit env variables), you run the npm command... and it wants root access? To install packages system-wide? So you google around, find a way to make it use the user home directory. Then you are up and running, you aren't sure what this "React" thing is, but you get stuff done. Time to deploy - and you are told to either learn Docker (and Kubernetes if you want zero downtime), or to use one of few hosting companies with a price markup. Well, at least there is a free tier (for now), so most people choose the latter. Was this a simple start?
Now, when it comes to big apps, I'd very much rather use Nextjs than PHP, it is production-tested, gives you a lot "for free", JS LSP is built-in to VSCode, I already know React and most of JS ecosystem. But if somebody tells me that they just finished learning HTML and vanilla JS, and they want to do something simple server-side, I'm torn on what to recommend nowadays.
Running it on a VPS is a skill on it's own, for both, if users had known to use NVM (which is explained in most top articles in Google) it would have not been a problem and if they don't know they should accept the learning pains of running productions apps (PHP, node or whatever), or otherwise use a managed service such as Vercel.
Upgrading PHP version is even more painful, I've tried to do version updates, and was alway easier just to build a new server. And also requires specific knowledge of apache, or nginx. Let alone deal with server outages, backups, restart, memory issues.
And how to install every version you want NVM, that's on the user if it didn't work. That's not something different then can happen with PHP or other tools as mysql in the LAMP setup.
Rhel 7 is still alive, supports node 8, maybe 12, but nothing higher officially.
It's fairly normal to run some version of `npm run serve` with a filesystem watcher that will hot-reload changes as they occur so that you can see changes every time you hit :w (or CMD+S or whatever saves a file on your filesystem)
That's equally true of PHP.
Moreover, it's equally true that distros aren't always shipping the latest PHP versions, and that there are similar flamewars surrounding phpenv/pvm as there are nvm/asdf. There are options, and people have opinions. The more ensconced one gets in an ecosystem, the more easy it is to know which tools offer which benefits relative to your needs. None of those decisions are easily made when new to an ecosystem -- Elixir is newish and has enough coalescence around most of the mainstream things, but as someone new to it, if I needed to choose between Cowboy and Bandit, I would have quite a bit of learning required upfront.
I upgraded PHP 7.2 to 8.3 for a business client yesterday.
It was a CentOS VM.
It took maybe 5 commands, no server restart involved either.
I could barely bill an hour and that is because I kept tail -f their logs to see if everything went smooth. And it did.
How is that painful?
And your example, codeigniter, is one of the worst examples in PHP.
Not only it is a framework that has minor usage: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=codeigniter,larav...
It is infamous for being hard to upgrade. No responsible PHP developer would start a complex project in it today.
A typical PHP project in the last years use either Laravel or Symfony.
Not to mention PHP has mature tooling to perform automated code upgrade between versions: https://github.com/rectorphp/rector
The project I mentioned was 4 years old and so far no code change was required between PHP 7.2 and PHP 8.3.
And again, my parent was clearly talking about server upgrade: "was alway easier just to build a new server".
And the change I had to do was not even multiple lines, it was a single line in a Dockerfile. I found the Pull Request and it was from 7.4 to 8.3:
Saying Code Igniter is not used in a lot of places because of Google trends is wrong for a lot of reasons, but the biggest of which being your graph shows laravel and codeigniter neck and neck a decade ago. Who cares whether new projects are started in code igniter? PHP is mostly legacy apps, and there are other frameworks with similar nightmare stories.
Again, JS is bad too, but we have to completely rewrite sites due to some PHP framework upgrades because PHP let's people do really dumb ORM templating.
I have no idea what you're referring to with your distinction between tech debt and server upgrades. I'm talking about server upgrades, clearly. I'm just saying if you upgrade PHP on an old project chances are things will break. This happens with Laravel and Slim too.
PHP has nothing to do with ORM problems. Any language allows dumb stuff related to ORM. Those are the libraries rather than the language.
PHP, like any language, has good and bad libraries.
If a project uses a bad solution for ORM, the language is not to blame.
I can do dumb ORM stuff in C#, Java, Rust, C++ and Python.
If a project picked a bad framework 10 years ago and now complains about the language instead of the framework I don't know what to tell you.
The same goes for Node, which doesn't break servers just because you upgrade it. I have updated from 12 to 20 with no problems because of the dependencies.
> Again, JS is bad too, but we have to completely rewrite sites due to some PHP framework upgrades because PHP let's people do really dumb ORM templating.
I even quoted this part specifically in my reply:
> because PHP let's people do really dumb ORM templating.
You might have had a smooth experience, and happy for you. But PHP didn't have, maybe it does now, such a good version manager as NVM.
But yeah we also had once where all the way back where we didn't do it with NVM and that was a pain in the ass.
I just use Docker for both local development and remote deployments, with bind mounts of source code when I'm working the code, sometimes with appropriate remote debugging set up. I don't even care that much about what packages or versions are available on my workstation OS, as long as Docker (or another OCI runtime like Podman) works. Same for external dependencies, like Redis, RabbitMQ, MariaDB/MySQL/PostgreSQL and so on, they can just be throwaway containers, or maybe something more persistent in a cloud deployment.
I can even start with an Alpine/Debian/Ubuntu/whatever base image and install the packages myself in whatever order I want, to use as a base image for all of my apps. And on the server, I can run whatever cluster I want, since Docker Swarm or Nomad will be way easier to use for most use cases than a full distro of Kubernetes (although K3s is fine). That takes care of scheduling, health checks, restarts, resource limits and reservations, storage, networking and a lot of other concerns.
I usually have some sort of a web server as a reverse proxy in front of everything anyways (Apache/Nginx/Caddy/Traefik/...), so it's no big deal to add a bit of configuration. Even on PHP side, setting up PHP-FPM is a few commands and any configuration for either is sufficient with either environment variables, or changing a few files. Maybe a Bash script for an entrypoint that does the setup for every container launch, based on the needed configuration.
As an aside, with Apache you often don't really need to use .htaccess since disabling it and using configuration files under sites-enabled is better for lower IO, much like Nginx, since you don't need to scan every directory to look for the file: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/howto/htaccess.html#wh...
Node is fine. I don't even need to use nvm locally, I can just have different base images for containers with different node versions and then easily check how easy it would be to carry all of my software over to something else (by swapping out the base image), without messing around with installing stuff manually. As for installing packages "globally"? Who cares, it's all inside of the container image anyways, so suddenly that distinction doesn't matter in the slightest.
I don't need any external services or PaaS providers, it's just a container that I can run on pretty much any VPS host and horizontally and vertically scale as far as I need. Regardless of whether inside of the container there's JS, PHP, Java, .NET, Ruby, Python or anything else. This is especially nice when I can use Woodpecker CI or Drone CI, or GitLab CI or pretty much anything else and not worry about polluting workspace folders, the builds use containers.
And with modern frameworks and libraries, it's pretty hard to go wrong: Express and Next are okay, Laravel is okay, Spring Boot is okay, ASP.NET is okay, Ruby on Rails is okay, Django is okay, there's a lot of established options out there. Do they have pain points? Sure, but they hardly matter. Docker solved software development for me.
Honestly, just use whatever works for you. jQuery has its place, so does Node and PHP. I think I even have some Perl running somewhere.
Then when you switch to node, or basically any other language, you wonder where your file based logic is, and everything feels annoying and painful.
Do you really need to host your own server to run a single file? Yes, you do with PHP too, but it’s hidden in Apache and php-fpm.
Nowadays the basics are just abstracted away and talking with developers today who might even have never seen the basic version of an on old-school Webserver or a simple HTTP request executed manually via telnet runs sometimes into really weird error and root causes analysis.
So sometimes I wish the younger developers would know a bit more from the old world while the older developers now a bit more of the new world of web technologies (apache and a cgi driven bash script are not always the best solution even if you can squeeze ultimately everything into making even that work depending on your time and sadistic level :-)).
Most of the modern solutions out there have been developed to solve very specific problems for a certain group of people (see the difference between React and Angular in that regard) and not always the solution everyone seems to use is the best for your problem, team and business.