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Published on September 6, 2024

Look out, kids: PHP is the new JavaScript

Dave Kiss
By Dave Kiss * 9 min read * Engineering
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I haven't taken a serious look at PHP in over a decade--and that's on
me. Feels bad, given the current hype and traction. Especially
because that's where my journey with coding all started. I'm the
ambitious, starry-eyed dreamer that left my hometown.php in the dust
for the big city lights and never looked back.

But there's been a palpable shift in the air. You can sense it.
People seem... excited about PHP.

What happened? Well. Laravel happened (and has been happening).

I've literally never touched Laravel. That changes today, here, now,
in this blog post, raw, unwrapped before your very eyes. Will I
become a fan? Will you? Unknown. Let's see what we uncover.

But first... we have to address the obvious.

 How PHP soured thousands of developers

I've met so, so many developers who earned their wings by writing a
procedural, top-to-bottom home.php and hucking it up to DreamHost via
FTP. It was PHP's learning curve--or better yet, lack of a learning
curve--that made it so dang easy to get started feeling like a magical
internet hax0r:

home.php
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<?php
  $descriptions = array('cool', 'hip', 'funky', 'dynamic');
  $choice = array_rand($descriptions);
  echo "Welcome to my " + $choice + " website";

  // todo: page counter goes here
?>

However, it was this same swiss army knife approach that ultimately
handed it a bad rap. This sort of no-guardrails code drilled the idea
that PHP was never going to be a viable choice for scaling apps of
the future into the heads of thousands of devs who, just like me,
have never checked back in.^1 Poor design decisions, regrettable
function names, global variables... oh my.

It's not that there weren't any conventions or frameworks. It's just...
to me, even those weren't so hot (CodeIgniter? Symfony? Kohana?
W...Wo...WordPress? shudders).

The truth is, I only learned PHP (and honestly, to write code at all)
because I had no other option. I never even wanted to be a programmer
. I yearned for a personal website with more functionality and pizazz
than your run-of-the-mill index.html but, back in 2007, the only
collateral you'd find in my college pockets were
suspiciously-dirt-cheap Lionshead bottle caps with rebus puzzles
printed on the underside. I had no cash to pay a "real" developer,
so... down the rabbit hole I went.

And in that hole I stayed. In that deep, dark hole. Where I also
befriended jQuery, Subversion, and Bootstrap. And lots of lost
laundry socks.

 NodeJS and the decade of JavaScript

I'm fast-forwarding a bit for brevity, but it wasn't too much later
that a chap named Ryan Dahl introduced a way to execute JavaScript
code outside a web browser.

What a moment that was. You mean to tell me that I can write
JavaScript everywhere? That my whole stack would forever be at peace,
hugging, shaking hands, laughing over a fine dinner, seamlessly
handing off front-end interactivity to backend logic in a blissful
state of being?

The minds of developers everywhere activated all at once, racing with
possibility. We braced for impact and endured a furious flurry.
Ember. Express. Backbone. Koa. Meteor. Knockout. Knockback. Rivets.
AngularJS. The... other Angular.

Oh, gosh. The wars had begun. And I'd cried more tears and curled up
in bed longer than ever. Was this the actual bottom of the dark hole?
Would I ever want to code again? How do we recover from this?^2

Almost on cue, I heard about React from a guy named Wes. Fatigued,
with cold sweats, I bought his course, begrudgingly subscribing to
learn yet another JS tool.

Unexpectedly, the clouds parted. I could tell: at least for me, the
storm was over.

It's okay, Dave. Open your eyes. You can climb out of that hole. It's
all gonna be okay.

I wasn't the only one who felt that way. There were frameworks to be
built. We were entering the next era.

 
Guillermo Rauch
 
Guillermo Rauch
@rauchg
*Follow
 

React is such a good idea that we will spend the rest of the decade
continuing to explore its implications and applications.

10:14 AM * Nov 22, 2016 
 
963 
Reply
Copy link
Read 21 replies

 A little project named Laravel

All the while, some kid named Taylor Otwell had been happily chipping
away at a more advanced alternative to CodeIgniter. He published the
first Laravel beta release all the way back in June of 2011. How'd I
miss that? Where was I? Even more, where was he? I don't know Taylor,
but how he managed to escape unscathed from the Great Unrest(tm) of the
JavaScript ecosystem completely blows my mind.^3

My understanding of Laravel is even more cursory. But still, even as
an uninformed outsider, I am vaguely aware that one of Laravel's top
selling points is the first-class support for what feels like
everything that you'd ever possibly want to implement in a web
application.

Need to manage Stripe subscriptions? Cashier can help with that. Want
feature flags? Sure, there's Pennant. There's even a supported
package for social authentication called Socialite.

A list of the apps within the Laravel ecosystem

These aren't community contributions, mind you. These are supported
by the same folks that built the core Laravel framework. Okay, that's
pretty sweet. There's what sticking to the same tech for 13+ years
will do for ya. +1 internet point to Laravel. +1 internet point to...
PHP? What year is it?

 Here's what makes Laravel so great

Just kidding, I don't actually know the answer to that yet. We're
going in cold. Let's build something live. Now.

A screenshot of the hero image from laravel.com

I visit the Laravel website, click the creamy orange Get Started
button as fast as humanly possible, and jump straight towards the
Installation docs.

Instructions for creating a Laravel project

I see me! I'm on macOS. Gimme Laravel Herd, whatever that is.
Immediate download, install, open. Didn't check for package validity
or anything. Don't tell our security team.

A screenshot of Laravel Herd

Oh nice. No CLI here. I'm great at clicking buttons.

Choose a template for your new site
Using no starter kit
Setting the project name and configuration
The world's newest bootstrapped Laravel site

Bam! A Laravel project initiated without typing a single keystroke. I
haven't really had to use my brain at all yet. I don't know about
you, but that's a good day.

I open up the scaffolded code and give it a look-see.

A scaffolded Laravel project opened in the Cursor IDE

Some minimal clicking around gives me the lay of the land. Routes are
defined in... well, /routes. The default route loads up a view called 
welcome. I'll be honest, I wasn't expecting to look in the /resources
directory for a view, but I suppose it's not too unusual.

A look at welcome.blade.php

There we go, some HTML. I'm ready to take this app by the horns.
cracks knuckles

Wait a sec.

I write blog posts these days, not production code (we'll leave that
up to the rest of the experts here at Mux).

Not to worry. That's what AI IDEs like Cursor are for. Let's fake it
til we make it.

Coding with Cursor AI

    I know nothing about Laravel. Zero. Can you please remove all
    content and edit this page to show a demo video using Mux Player?
    You can find out how to do that with some example code on the Mux
    Documentation.
    @https://docs.mux.com/guides/play-your-videos

Me, to Cursor

I copy-pasta Cursor's AI-generated response into the 
welcome.blade.php

The Cursor HTML output, rendered within the browser

Holy moly, it actually worked. There's my video. Right there in Mux
Player. It plays back flawlessly. It looks good. It's correctly
centered within a div. How? How?

resources/views/welcome.blade.php
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<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="{{ str_replace('_', '-', app()->getLocale()) }}">
    <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8">
        <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

        <title>Mux Player Demo</title>

        <!-- Mux Player Script -->
        <script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@mux/mux-player"></script>
    </head>
    <body>
        <div style="display: flex; justify-content: center; align-items: center; height: 100vh;">
            <mux-player
                playback-id="DS00Spx1CV902MCtPj5WknGlR102V5HFkDe"
                metadata-video-title="Mux Demo Video"
                metadata-viewer-user-id="user-123"
                stream-type="on-demand"
                style="width: 80%; max-width: 800px;"
            ></mux-player>
        </div>
    </body>
</html>

That's not gonna cut it though. I need some dynamic routing. This new
Laravel app is that start of something huge. It'll need to load up
thousands of UGC videos, each having their own Playback ID. It's the
future. The next big thing. I rewrite my next prompt:

My second Cursor prompt

I love your can-do attitude, Cursor. Make me look good.

Here's what it's suggesting we do:

First, we should create a new view file called video.blade.php in the
resources/views directory

resources/views/video.blade.php
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<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="{{ str_replace('_', '-', app()->getLocale()) }}">
    <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8">
        <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

        <title>Mux Video Player</title>

        <!-- Mux Player Script -->
        <script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@mux/mux-player"></script>
    </head>
    <body>
        <div style="display: flex; justify-content: center; align-items: center; height: 100vh;">
            <mux-player
                playback-id="{{ $playbackId }}" &ZeroWidthSpace;
                metadata-video-title="Mux Video"
                metadata-viewer-user-id="user-123"
                stream-type="on-demand"
                style="width: 80%; max-width: 800px;"
            ></mux-player>
        </div>
    </body>
</html>

Okay. Looks basically the same, except we have a Mustache-like
handlebar dollar sign variable in place of where the playback ID once
was. Dollar sign, I've missed you!

Next, we create a simple controller at app/Http/Controllers/
VideoController.php

app/Http/Controllers/VideoController.php
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<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Illuminate\Http\Request;

class VideoController extends Controller
{
    public function show($playbackId)
    {
        return view('video', ['playbackId' => $playbackId]);
    }
}

This part took me back to my aimless Chicago afternoons spent
noodling in Rails. I reminisce, dancing fondly through my historic
abuse of var_dump and binding.pry. It's all coming back to me now.

That was then. Laravel is now.

Finally, we're to create a new route in routes/web.php

routes/web.php
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<?php

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Route;
use App\Http\Controllers\VideoController; &ZeroWidthSpace;

Route::get('/', function () {
    return view('welcome');
});

Route::get('/videos/{playbackId}', [VideoController::class, 'show']); &ZeroWidthSpace;

Two lines of code. What do we think? Is it gonna work? I move the
playback ID up into the URL, visit http://noideawhatimdoing.test/
videos/DS00Spx1CV902MCtPj5WknGlR102V5HFkDe, cross my fingers and
toes, and hit refresh.

Dynamic video page in Laravel

Boom! LFG Laravel! A dynamic video page, built in just a few minutes.

So it's looking like the Route definition allocated the playbackId
variable to whatever appeared in the URL path at that location and
handed it off to the controller. Then, the controller took the baton
and propagated it down to the view. MVC never felt so right.

I probably should double-check another playback ID, just to be safe.
I change the URL.

A second dynamic video page

Sure enough, my dynamic video playback app powered by Mux is ready
for the masses.

 What is this feeling?

I have to say... that was easy. Too easy. Nice separation of concerns.
Valid code generated by the AI underlords. Big, bright, beautiful
orange buttons.

I'm starting to feel a bit funny inside. What have I been doing all
this time? I click around the directory structure a bit more.

A screenshot of the directory structure in a barebones Laravel app

Does this thing come with a database too? And Auth? Mail? Queue
management? Sessions? Testing? How is this possible? How does it come
with everything? Is fast-as-heck video transcoding, battle-tested
delivery at scale, and quality of playback experience monitoring up
next? Are we as a company doomed? Who are you, really, Taylor Otwell,
sir???? And how did you get that Lambo??

Taylor Otwell's GitHub profile page, showing a ton of work history.
Oh. That's probably how.

Okay. One more improvement. Just one more and we'll call this little
experiment finished.

Last prompt in Cursor AI

    I want this video playback page to be the best that anyone has
    ever seen. Beautifully designed. Expertly crafted. We don't need
    new tooling, or extra JavaScript, or excessive mentions of "use
    client" -- nope, not here. This is Laravel, baby. I'm a believer.
    Whip it up. Do your thang. Make this page shine with some
    incredible CSS. And don't forget to use Laravel's signature
    creamy orange color: #f9322c
    You might even wanna give Laravel a warm shout out in big bold
    text at the top of the page.

Some great PHP Artisan
The final product

Now that's a video player.

 PHP is dead. Long live PHP!

Am I a convert? A newly-minted PHP Web Artisan? You bet your bottom 
$dollar I am. Depending on how critical you are of my AI coding
approach, you might argue that I've still literally never touched a
Laravel application. But I'll tell ya what: Laravel makes PHP fun
again. I am here for it. Maybe you should be, too.


 1. A small app named Facebook proceeded to prove this wrong. Maybe
    you've heard of it.-
 2. Devs of the 2010s walked so devs of the 2020s could run. If you
    survived... just know that you're appreciated. nods-
 3. If you do wanna be friends, hmu. I'm fun at parties. Okay at
    Bananagrams. Can work a Traeger decently.-

Written By

Dave Kiss

Dave Kiss - Senior Community Engineering Lead

Was: solo-developreneur. Now: developer community person. Happy to
ride a bike, hike a hike, high-five a hand, and listen to spa music.

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