While I can appreciate the good intentions of the developers, for me, this just screams waste of effort. I can't see a way that this will ever gain widespread acceptance.
From what I understand this targets developers who:
A) Come from a javascript background
and
B) Want to deploy on cheap hosters where node isn't available?
and
C) Don't care about performance and don't mind the additional complexity of the transpiler.
I can understand that it might not seem useful to you if you already have a stack you've invested in, or it just doesn't fit the kind of projects you are working on.
But I just wanted to respond to a few things. :)
> A) Come from a javascript background
It targets all web developers, who are all generally familiar with JavaScript. It aims to be another tool, not a total replacement for all projects.
> B) Want to deploy on cheap hosters where node isn't available?
Shared hosting is still a very popular way to run websites. And node is often overkill for basic CRUD sites.
> C) Don't care about performance
There is a big difference between not needing to support 100+ requests per second and "not caring". :) Out of the box, PHP is fast enough for a lot of apps, and the overhead of THT is not enough to be noticeable at that scale.
> don't mind the additional complexity of the transpiler
There are no build steps, so the extra complexity just involves running the initial setup script. After that, you drop in new files and update them like you would with PHP. Ideally, it won't feel more complex than any other framework.
> Can this even leverage the enormous PHP ecosystem?
This is on the roadmap. Though there are still plenty of projects that don't use 3rd party libraries and could be built with THT as it is today.
I personally have never needed to use composer, etc. in my projects, but it's still something I am looking to support.
Thanks for the response.. Wish you nothing but the best...
My comment about complexity in the transpiler is more about debugging and what do you do when you can't figure out where your bug is, because it's in the transpiler. ;)
And I think your last sentence regarding composer makes it clearer whom this is aimed at.
This looks like a great transitional framework for people who need to support existing PHP code or infrastructure and aren’t ready to make the jump to React just yet.
I'm curious as to the design decisions behind the THTML[1]. Some of them, like the double or triple arrow tags seem like they are going to be confusing in practice. It becomes a constant question or intent or typo (at least in my mind).
As I scroll through the page...
> familiar JavaScript like syntax
> provides a Perl module
From what depths of hell did this arise?