i think we are just so stuck in “our ways” @Teodor… having worked in php so long you take it for granted… and guess its the best thing under the sun… and the learning curve to nodejs when one does not always have the “answers” at hand… then one just goes to “what works for you” … so yes its me being lazy… and not willing to take the full plunge… i agree… but yes I agree with your statement…
Maybe oneday ill get of my lazy ass and dedicate hours to getting to know nodejs…
There is no any knowledge required for any of the server models included in Wappler.
Server actions have the same UI no matter what server model are you using. You don’t need to be a javascript guru to use nodejs, same way as you don’t need to be a PHP guru to use PHP in Wappler 
If PHP works fine for you, then i see no reason to switch to nodejs. If you need features such as realtime data, then nodejs is the better choice.
Personally, I was familiar and a little bit stuck in my ways with PHP and decided to use NodeJS for new projects. It really wasn't much of a learning curve (as @Teodor says, Wappler looks and acts the same irrespective of server model) but have found it to be more responsive and the realtime data future is a huge bonus. The server-side data / security restrict redirect element is also really useful. There is NO WAY I would start a new project now in PHP!
I still have some old PHP projects which I would love to switch to NodeJS but they have hundreds of server actions, have many pages and use Argon pw hashing. @jonl provided an extension for Argon so that can be achieved but the prospect of copy/pasting the JSON for each server action and then adjusting file paths fills me with dread and I just don't have the time to do it. I would love it if @george added the converter to the upcoming features:
This has actually made me lazy. 
But, there always comes a certain point while working on Wappler projects.. where you absolutely have to try to understand how things work under the hood. But until then, Wappler takes away major complexity. 
What @Teodor wrote is real.
I can consider me a “code agnostic” on the server side. As all of you at the beginning I had some difficulties with Node.JS until… I understood that was just mental blocks.
an important block was the lack of the old, dear FTP … so I felt helpless because I didn’t have control of what was on the server …
moreover the different organization of the files in Node.JS clashed with my orthodox formation of the old directory “public_html”
In all of this then I did the only thing that could really help me to skip these problems, which is to transform the old web application from PHP / FTP to Node.JS with docker.
At the first attempt I had some small problems solved thank you posts here in the forum.
Now the situation changed: I would never back to the old FTP!! Deploying with Docker is amazing. Wappler manage everything and you really no need to make anything on the server.
I stop to be anxious because cannot access files on the docker machine and, most important, I verified that develop in Node.JS is exactly as developing with PHP, with the difference that Node.JS has some options more like sockets.io.
I read a lot in the forum of people writing about difficulty to pass to Node.JS but have to tell the truth that most of the problems are in our mind and the ways we are used to work.
But you will not learn until you must develop a real project !
PHP gets the job done. It is the most used server side web development language for a reason. It is simple to develop and support. There may be a few special situation requiring real time interaction that may call for Node.JS. But always make sure you are not trying to use a hammer to kill a fly.
Wordpress is the reason. It’s a slow backend. It has been improved in the latest versions but it’s still subpar nowadays.
Just read in a paper that PHP needs more than 6 times the energy to run than JS. If you are concerned about the environment and inflation there you have another good reason.
Unfortunately these bastards used wordpress to publish the results of their investigation!
So if you thought I was over with this topic…I still need to throw some more punches at PHP.
For years I’ve had to endure comments like “PHP is the most used language on the internet” as a sign of popularity. And while that is true from an end-user perspective it’s basically a vanity metric that should say absolutely nothing to people that have to decide on a programming language to create a website. That’s you by the way.
Here you have a a metric that should matter to you. The popularity of php vs JS/TS in Github. The place where people that have to support websites based on these programming languages live.
PHP has been in decline since 2013 and it seems it’s now stable at around 5% YoY Pull Requests. JS and TS combined (because it’s the same language) is at 18% competing with Python for the first place.
For the rest of metrics it’s more or less the same. JS/TS alternating with PY for the first place and PHP barely surviving.
So yes, PHP is the most popular language on the internet thanks to wordpress instances, but if you ever need to find support for your website you better stay away from that shit.
Source: https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2023/3
As a sidenote: I do believe Laravel is a great project with very smart people behind it taking very smart design decisions. Not extremely flexible but it is what it is. It’s a shame they went with PHP :D. Symfony is also nice.
I think some other people thought that way as well. 
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That’s a brilliant illustration of browser popularity over the years…!
