PHP for trial editor?

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nerdychara
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PHP for trial editor?

Post by nerdychara »

This is a question that has been bugging me for a few months but why is PHP the chosen language for the trial editor?


While I'm not completely opposed to PHP, everyone and their brother says it's awful. From what little of the trial editor codebase I've actually looked at, it's mostly HTML with PHP mixed in there. My initial guess is that it has to do with reading the forum database, but even then that could be a stretch.

If that's not the case, is there any other reason for why the code is PHP beyond migrating to something else like NodeJS could be hassle?
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TimeAxis
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Re: PHP for trial editor?

Post by TimeAxis »

It is for reading the forum database, to make sure only people who have valid permission can view/edit a trial. Keep in mind that this is like a 20 year old website and everything is built on top of the phpBB forum as a base.
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DeathByAutoscroll
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Re: PHP for trial editor?

Post by DeathByAutoscroll »

PHP was probably also chosen over NodeJS due to earlier versions of the AAO engine being written before it even existed, and then there being a lack of incentive to port over the engine to a new framework.
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ThePaSch
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Re: PHP for trial editor?

Post by ThePaSch »

AAO, and the infrastructure surrounding it, was first released in 2008, which predates the release of NodeJS in 2009—it literally did not exist when AAO was first created. And even then, when v6—i.e. the current iteration of AAO—was initially developed and released, the NodeJS ecosystem looked very different from how it looks today. ECMAScript 5 had just been rolled out; the same ECMAScript that is viewed as archaic in today’s times of hypermodern and modularized JS. PHP was a ubiquitous and highly frequently used backend language in those times (for instance, Facebook was written in PHP and continues to use it today) as part of the LAMP stack of technologies, which was the gold standard for a very long time.

You have to remember you’re not looking at a modern codebase here, but a legacy codebase that’s existed for almost two decades now. There isn’t really such a thing as “migrating” the codebase to NodeJS, as much as it would have to be a complete rewrite from the ground up. And this certainly isn’t something inherently impossible—in fact, it might even be something that has been talked about in more detail than some might think. But it’s still not something that should be expected in the foreseeable future.
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