[ale] Is PHP the easiest way to make a web application?

[DJPfulio at jdpfu.com]

Perl.  No need to know anything else.
It can be as simple (Dancer2) or as complex as you like (Mojolicious/Catalyst).  Amazon used Catalyst for about a decade. DDG community uses it.  Youporn used it until 2012.  I've used Dancer and Dancer2.  20 lines for a working single-table, DBMS-backed web-app that supports HTML, json, XML, and YAML output. That's it.  With Perl, scaling out is easy via PSGI.  Need 1 - 10,000 app servers? Not a problem.  Python and Ruby can do the same, I'm certain.

If you like, you could use Raku https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raku_(programming_language)

If you have a DBMS web-app, nothing compares to how well/easy Perl is to connect into nearly any DBMS.  Access is cached and flushed and updated through the expertise of the Perl DBIx gurus, which is better than anyone who isn't a expert DBA can accomplish.  For us, we just see perl objects and access them like any other perl object.

If you want something bonehead, perl-cgi still works today.

Of course, if you WANT javascript on the frontend, then that's possible using TT - Template Toolkit.

There are books on all these things.  Perl isn't the "hot new language" that kids want to learn, but it is still fast, efficient, and allows multiple methods to accomplish similar goals, without restricting you to just the 1 method some guy overseas things is the only way that should be allowed.  Perl is designed by a linguist - so the subtle differences ARE important.

http://atlanta.pm.org/ has monthly meetings. Stephen Cristol was the organizer the last time I attended.