GOgodot·Apr 1, 2018
I started a startup in 2013, and I picked PHP for a core language since I had a decade~ experience with it by then and it was a good enough reason to use it. PHP 7 wasn't available yet and nodejs was only starting to take off and didn't seem like the future yet.
Taking learning from previous companies, I've found the main thing PHP was lacking at the time was a good routing mechanism. We obviously don't want to rely on Apache hitting .php files to handle requests. So we used ToroPHP (https://github.com/anandkunal/ToroPHP) for routing, which is a seriously lightweight routing lib. Indeed we used composer and a lot of dependencies, but for our own codebase we used manual includes instead of the autoloader. With the usual PHP production setup like APC with opcode caching enabled and file stat'ing off (later on opcache + APCu), we handled sca
Read the rest
le extremely well. (mentioning this because a counter-point for manual includes is that many requests would unnecessarily load way too many code files)
As far as codebase maintenance and growth go, that PHP codebase was actually very easily manageable even with manual includes. Having routing solved frees you up to organize your code files in any ways you want. Even today, I have a mini-framework structured this way for myself to start side projects and test ideas with. (Yes, using PHP5 for side projects in 2018 ;)
My point in bringing all this up is that the architecture this article is trying to take you in, seems unnecessarily complicated for PHP.
This past year I've been working in a full nodejs shop and this entire architecture (from this article) reminds me heavily of how a node/express app is structured. Someone else on this thread mentioned modern languages have their architectures converging. This is exactly what's happening. Even as a PHP fan, it makes me feel a bit of "Why use PHP at this point, instead of nodejs/go/python?" while reading this. It feels like if you wanted to go this route, nodejs is a better option on almost all fronts -- language syntax brevity, availability of packages, community, developer-availability. The only reason to use PHP at this point is nostalgia/sticking to PHP syntax.