>There is a generation out there that doesn't seem to know that server side rendering exists.
Oh, don't worry, they're reinventing it in JS. I've had a recent project proposal and one of the engineers said that to make the webpage faster we could prerender the pages on the server side with JS.
Like, at that point, you're just using PHP with a different name and worse performance (a small 4$ shared hoster can easily handle 1M users per month, I've yet to see a NodeJS app handle 1M users per month on a 5$ VPS without problems)
>Do you get why you'd prerender a JS app and why an isomorphic setup is fundamentally different than server side rendering with PHP?
Tbh, I'm not really interested. I can squeeze amazing performance out of a 10kB self-written JS library with noscript fallbacks than most JS-heavy apps out there. The sites I develop work with dialup connections or worse. Because my phone regularly has only such a connection. Modern JS apps are a pain to use under such conditions, I've not noticed much difference between prerendered JS and unprerendered JS, it's both crap under these conditions.
On the other hand, Orange Forum loaded almost instantly (less than 10 seconds) on a crappy GPRS 16kbps connection. Discourse or NodeBB don't load at all and if I'm lucky enough I might see some error message or crapped out webpage.
>Also, JS performs as well or better than PHP. Not sure why you guys get so ideological about this.
I have only ever seen evidence of the contrary.
I can run a 1M user/month website with 128MB of RAM on a shared hoster using PHP. If you get a good shared hosters you can probably hit 10M user/month.
I have not seend a nodejs app that can handle 1M user/month on a 5$ VPS, which has 512MB RAM and probably more CPU and disk than the shared hoster offering.
But I'm willing to rethink this if I see real world evidence that a comparable software set runs better and more efficiently in JS than PHP. I won't consider synthetic benchmarks since those rarely model real world usage and comparable means the software must be usuable with and without JS on the client enabled.
Discourse is a Rails forum with a JS frontend. It's bloated. I don't disagree with your PHP experiences, you're extrapolating from:
1) your personal experience
2) mature software vs immature software
3) bad software vs good software
You can't say you're "not interested" in understanding the other side, throw out your own anecdotal benchmarks, draw conclusions from that, and then demand that others provide "non-synthetic" benchmarks in order to prove you wrong. Well, you can, but it doesn't seem especially objective.
My point is, you can write any kind of app with almost any kind of server-side tech. If you don't like the culture, you may be right, but please be explicit about it.
Oh, don't worry, they're reinventing it in JS. I've had a recent project proposal and one of the engineers said that to make the webpage faster we could prerender the pages on the server side with JS.
Like, at that point, you're just using PHP with a different name and worse performance (a small 4$ shared hoster can easily handle 1M users per month, I've yet to see a NodeJS app handle 1M users per month on a 5$ VPS without problems)