WordPress Calypso

[Jason A. Lefkowitz]

Hey all --

Since WordPress is such a big part of the PHP ecosystem, curious what
peoples' thoughts are on their move towards Node/React:

https://developer.wordpress.com/calypso/

-- Jason Lefkowitz

--
Jason A. Lefkowitz
web: http://www.jasonlefkowitz.net
email: ja...@jasonlefkowitz.net

"A statesman... is a dead politician.
Lord knows, we need more statesmen." -- Bloom County

[Sandy Smith]

It’s an enterprisey thing to do, but then wordpress.com is an enterprise and functions at that scale. Though it seems like Node does very little here, so I’m not sure why they went that route instead of PHP 5.6, which is very fast, especially since 7 will be even faster. Not like V8 is slow, but it’s one less technology stack.

I doubt .org will ever see it integrated beyond as an optional extension to Jetpack, since the whole point of WP staying on ancient versions of PHP is that it’s meant to be a dead-simple install on any host, and node is anything but a simple install on any host.

-Sandy

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Sandy Smith - http://musketeers.me/

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[Samantha Quinones]

One of the really attractive things about JS right now is the ability to build isomorphic apps, like calypso, that can run in the browser and on the desktop and on a server. It's a sign of things to come. PHP's real strength is on the server handling requests, there's just more overhead to doing this properly in node. We're in the process with our platform right now of creating a rich JS app that can run in browser, mobile, or as a native desktop app (they're coming back! XD), but the back end APIs will remain PHP.

As a devoted and happy node.js developer, I still believe that PHP is the ideal language for web services. I see it being less and less relevant in UI development, though, in the future. :)

S

[William Hurley]

Probably also wanted some realtime socket communication. And PHP -- ReactPHP and Ratchet not withstanding -- isn't a great language / interpreter for that. YMMV.

William Hurley

Manager, Technical Development

whu...@forumone.com

www.forumone.com
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Forum One: Extend Your Influence

[Jason A. Lefkowitz]

This seems right to me, though I don't think it's necessarily going to not have an impact on the .org product. One of the big features they're promoting for the new .com is improved ability to manage all your self-hosted .org sites through the .com interface. I could imagine a future where they continue in that direction and the self-hosted product just becomes a thinner and thinner presentation layer for work that's actually being done more and more in the centralized service. Maybe the content even stops living in the self-hosted instance entirely and lives at wordpress.com instead.

That would actually strengthen the "easy install anywhere" pitch for the self-hosted product, since the more responsibilities they offload to the centralized service the fewer features would be needed on the web host to run the self-hosted software. If your content actually lives at the .com, for instance, they could drop MySQL as a dependency completely, which would make setup even easier and eliminate a whole category of common install/maintenance problems. At the furthest extreme, the hosting requirements for what is essentially an API-connected embed code are pretty minimal.

That approach would also make it easier for them to keep the entire WordPress community's software up to date in a world where people don't run updates, since they could just update the centralized service and be done with it. This would be similar to the way that Google has been loading more and more of what used to be thought of as Android into Google Play Services, so they can update it directly without having to push an update through the carriers.

The big downside of course would be that your "self-hosted" software now has gigantic dependencies on a centralized remote service you have no control over, which would mean fun times if/when that service ever get slow or goes down. But that's only a downside if you care about such things, and in my experience most people don't. And of course the more of the WordPress world they can move into the .com, the more the value of the .com goes up and the more opportunities they have to monetize you; which, yuck.

(/me removes tinfoil hat)

-- Jason

[Eric Maag]

Jason,

Another downside I can see of having it all hosted by WP is content
ownership. There are certainly use cases where you would want full
ownership of your content and not being handled by a 3rd party.

Eric