Switching to NodeJS

I pulled the trigger on PHP to focus on Javascript.

It wasn’t an easy choice to make, but I found many good reasons to spend some extra time migrating Cowriters from Symphony to NodeJS.

Performance has been my main focus over the last few months. I want Cowriters to have the best CMS/rendering engine there is, not only for SEO and the increased traffic it can generate, but also to provide a great user experience.

Node performs significantly better than PHP when it comes to web applications. Its non-blocking I/O model is great for traffic-intensive websites, and allows for interesting features like real-time messaging (hello Cowriters’ very own chat app) or concurrent request management (hello fast collaborative features). The web is asynchronous by definition, so it will be a great fit for what I envision at Cowriters.

I’m progressively moving to a JAMStack architecture, with heavy use of browser APIs. Using Symfony in association with a technology like React leads to code duplication when I try to pre-render webpages, and switching from one language to another is cumbersome, so I’ll increase my development speed tremendously by writing in Javascript the whole time. Since Javascript isn’t going anywhere any time soon, I might as well embrace it for everything.

On a personal note, I’m also taking into account my future ability to work on exciting projects, and PHP doesn’t seem to be used by companies I’m interested in. It’s the most mainstream language out there, and Wordpress still represents 20% of the Internet, but I just don’t think I’ll ever wish to work on Wordpress plugins. All the cool startups use frameworks like Next, Gatsby, and other Javascript frameworks, and more and more machine learning tools using NodeJS are also seeing the light of the day, which is probably never going to happen with PHP.

Last but not least, I want to be able to laugh at jokes about PHP developers. I don’t quite get them at the present moment :)