I don't think PHP is that good of a language to use for a glue from frontend to backend. Compared with Perl, Python, and Ruby, PHP is missing a number of important features; ability to serve multiple requests in the same OS thread (coroutines / events), ability to abstract the database in an OO way (do they even have prepared statements yet?), and so on. Its JSON parser is also slow, and JSON is how browsers and servers communicate now.
Anyway, not buying it. PHP's asset is "you get MySQL and templating for free in pages served by Apache", but most web apps don't use MySQL, templating, or Apache these days.
Anyway, not buying it. PHP's asset is "you get MySQL and templating for free in pages served by Apache", but most web apps don't use MySQL, templating, or Apache these days.