[alt227]

>but does anyone realistically make websites or web apps that way?

You are correct in that a lot of PHP use now is larger frameworks with asset compilation and cache clearing etc, but even when developing on large systems like that it is nice to sometimes be able to just manually tweak a file and refresh.

For R&D and quick tests, just uploading a quick & dirty php file to the server is a very useful language feature to have IMO.

[jayflux]

> For R&D and quick tests it is a very useful language feature to have IMO

Right, but unless you have an ftp server or quick ssh access and PHP isn’t doing any code caching that feature isn’t an advantage, how many developers are in that situation? Is this something you do?

If you’re running locally PHP spawns its own server which other runtimes have. If you’re running this on a server you’re most likely going to have app/code caching (apc Or opcache) switched on so you’ll need to restart the server anyway, in which case it’s not more advantageous than uploading a js file and restarting node.

[alt227]

> Right, but unless you have an ftp server or quick ssh access

These days all of that is built right into IDEs

> Is this something you do?

Yes. After linking my IDE to a remote location I can then noodle around with scripts to test whatever. The immediate nature of PHP means the instant you hit ctrl-s your changes are live online.

> If you’re running this on a server you’re most likely going to have app/code caching (apc Or opcache) switched on so you’ll need to restart the server anyway

In prod yes, but in dev environments all that is switched off as its not needed.