> the dependency on PHP can turn many developers away from using it.
the dependency on <chose your programming language> can turn many developers away from using it.
> Almost all interactive elements are built using jQuery, which, while a great library in many respects, is weak in comparison to many of the emerging front end frameworks we have today — ReactJS, AngularJS and others.
Weak? what does that even mean? Also the author is horribly confused because he compares a library with two frameworks.
Calling jQuery weak in this context is like calling C weak in comparison to Java, however, I would still prefer to write my operating system in C thank you very much.
> I’ve already mentioned using localStorage as a mechanism for providing caching in front end apps, ensuring content is loaded quickly, avoiding ugly loading screens and flashes of blank content, but this only goes so far. As ReactJS (and soon AngularJS 2.0) can be run on the server as well as in the browser, we can pre-render the initial page load for the user on the server, and then hand-off all future content and navigation requests to the browser.
You solve a problem that you introduced in the first place. I'm surprised I don't see MongoDb mentioned anywhere in this article.
Wordpress is a pretty terrible platform to work on as a developer, however introducing trendy technologies will not make it any better. Ironically JavaScript is more similar to PHP than a lot of people care to admit:
* JavaScript, just like PHP was not designed for what people are using it for today
* JavaScript, just like PHP is riddled with bad legacy
* JavaScript, just like PHP is trying to evolve to escape from that legacy and become more like other languages.
The fact of life right now, is that PHP and MySQL are well understood technologies, countless web applications in production are using them, the same cannot be said for NodeJS and this has real world consequences, because running a NodeJS app on your laptop is totally different from running it in production.
On a standard Ubuntu machine, having a production viable PHP installation is 1 apt-get install away and I get: web server set up, error handling, logging and a standard way to customise the system wide configuration. With NodeJS, I have to worry about restarting it if it fails, logging the error, handling them, configuring the web server etc.
I find that people who criticize PHP, have no clue on what makes it so popular.