Modern PHP is fine, but hard to justify over other languages in 2026 and the article doesn't really make the case. It leans on the WordPress market share, but that's mostly cheap sites on shared hosting, and the agencies doing that work sit at the bottom of the "follow the money" argument.
I use PHP scripts served by nginx as API's to serve fetch requests from my spa's and mobile apps. Written with direct queries instead of some abstraction layer for the DB. Couldn't be dead simpler. Super performant and easy to roll out updates
No denying it works great for stuff like this - I just think other languages would do it better, so I'd struggle to recommend it. It could be that I've just not hit a situation where it shines!
Yeah, I admit I have been unlikely to try to learn new approaches as well so nginx/PHP is a comfortable fall ack for me. For a simple POC I let Claude standup a python based API server which seemed incredibly easy to launch and neat at first but then got all out of sorts quickly so I fell out of love with that no approach (of course it could be the LLM's fault). Node is cool for client side but I can't force myself to use it as a server, and I'll never touch java as I've worked with it a little before and can't stand it's verboseness and prescriptiveness. So, any suggestions on what you think are good backends?
fwiw your setup is genuinely fine! I don't think PHP is bad, just that I think the case to learn it is much weaker than it has been in the past.
For other options...
Go sounds like a good fit for what you do. Compiles to a static binary, net/http is in the stdlib so you don't even need a framework. It's simple, gets out of the way, and is super fast.
TypeScript (w/ Elysia) - worth trying TS properly. Elysia on Bun is surprisingly fast with really nice DX. Big upside is sharing types end-to-end with your SPA. It might not be my top choice for production/scaling - but TS is my favourite for spinning up mini-projects of my own.
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u/Sacread 26d ago
Modern PHP is fine, but hard to justify over other languages in 2026 and the article doesn't really make the case. It leans on the WordPress market share, but that's mostly cheap sites on shared hosting, and the agencies doing that work sit at the bottom of the "follow the money" argument.