WordPress moving away from PHP to JavaScript

[David Schwartz]

I started learning Delphi (originally called TurboPascal 8) when it was first released in 1995. In 2000 I spent most of the year building a web-based app using PHP, HTML, JS, and MySQL, a project I later abandoned b/c after digging around in some open-source code I found things there that would allow anybody to build my magical thing simply by uncommenting some compiler options that prevented some existing code from working. That was quite depressing.

So I turned back to Delphi and didn’t look back. There was a huge growth in Delphi’s use over the next 8-10 years in the adoption of Delphi for corporate software. It was eventually eclipsed by C#/.NET, and today the majority of jobs for Delphi programmers (in America, anyway) are maintenance positions keeping these legacy systems working.

Delphi was originally owned by Borland, who renamed itself Inprise, then split off their languages into CodeGear, which was finally sold to a private equity group named Embarcadero. Embarcadero itself has been bought and absorbed into a couple more companies, but they still keep cranking out new versions of Delphi annually. One thing they have NOT done is enhance the language much (probably b/c they dumped their dev team several years ago and are mostly just a marketing company now). They keep adding stuff to the periphery that targets the more premium-priced versions of the product (through product acquisitions), and keep steadily raising the price. Consequently, most of their revenues now coms from non-US sources, including Brazil, Columbia, and several European countries.

Delphi’s main target platform is still Windows, although it also supports MacOS, iOS, Android, and Linux.

The world has been moving towards a situation where more and more logic is being pushed into the browser, and Delphi’s owner has done nothing to help with that.

But a 3rd-party Delphi component/library vendor, TMS Software, has been working on something called TMS WEB Core that lets you write code within the Delphi IDE in Object Pascal and generate javascript apps that run in most any web browser. They’re basically using a transpiler to compile Delphi’s Object Pascal into javascript, and they’re into their fourth year of development of that technology. It’s an awesome platform. The transpiler itself, pas2js, is an open-source project, but the supporting infrastructure they use is proprietary. Thankfully, they’ve made some small enhancements to Delphi’s language to make it much easier to deal with the async nature of web programming.

The thing is, Embarcadero acts as if all of this is irrelevant. They just keep plodding forward making trivial enhancements to the language and piling on more and more Windows-specific additions to the platform the same way they’ve always done. 

The work TMS has done is slowly gaining traction, but since the vast majority of Delphi work is simply keeping a bunch of apps written between 2004 and 2009 alive, we’re not seeing much growth in new dev work. 

For a little while there were some components that let you integrate php with Delphi apps, but they fizzled out pretty quickly due to lack of interest.

Today there’s a lot more interest in some components that allow you to ingegrate Python scripts into Delphi.

But by far the most interest is in leveraging javascript (mostly via WEB Core) to support the client-side UI aspects of your project without having to know a lick of js.

Sadly, Delphi’s owners aren’t as insightful as Wordpress’ owners.

My biggest complaint is that memory management that web browsers employ for js apps is horrible. It consumes system memory and loses track of it to the point where the machine (my Macs, anyway) eventually just choke and spontaneously reboot for lack of available memory.

I hope Matt helps fix this problem because it impacts everybody who is using js inside of web browsers to build increasingly complex client-side apps.

-David Schwartz




> On Apr 20, 2024, at 7:32 AM, Keith Smith via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> This article says WordPress is moving away from PHP to JavaScript.  I think WordPress is shooting itself in the foot.  My main question has to do with resources given the shift from server side processing to browser based processing.
> 
> https://thenewstack.io/why-php-usage-has-declined-by-40-in-just-over-2-years/
> 
> Your thoughts are much appreciated.
> 
> Keith
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