People plug-in all sorts into python, why not `from microphp import tpl`, `tpl("blah.phtml")` etc.
<html..>
<? foreach($xs as $y): ?>
<? $y; ?>
<? endforeach; ?>
</html>But dedicated template languages have superior ergonomics these days, so why bother adapting PHP to it?
I've just used my own RYO CMS for 15+ years for website work... it's gone through lots of updates, but it's super simple. I'd never make it public as a framework because any decent dev should be able to roll their own anyway, and I don't need the aggravation. But it's basically a VERY simplified cross between {{handlebars}} and React, without attempting to bind the whole DOM to data, plus a DSL for specifying all the pages and modules of each website in SQL, and setting up english-language router rules.
I'd ditch ergonomics any day for understanding what's going on and being able to pare it down as much as possible. Simple website clients pay so little these days it's basically charity work... you need something you can both do in an hour AND never have to worry about WordPress updating.
Not surprising, but sad that Adobe flacks don't even know what it is. The world would be a lot more interesting if Macromedia was still a going concern, maybe aligned with Unity or some other ecosystem for game production.
I think I recall Flash did try to offer some type of iPhone app development features towards the end of it's useful life but Jobs effectively sentenced Flash to death so most everyone had jumped ship by this point.
Is there anything that would out of the box: 1) do fully static server-side rendering that outputs zero JS by default, 2) still be capable of rendering client-side interactive components where appropriate (for user agents with JS), 3) have both of the above as equal first-class citizens without contrived workarounds needed to achieve either interactivity or SSR, 4) handle all required bundling/fetching at build stage and load fast at runtime, 5) be isomorphic and leverage TypeScript typings to validate the correctness of the whole thing at build time as much as possible, and ideally 6) allow easy reuse of preexisting React components?
"my use case doesn't need a JS framework so we don't need JS frameworks"