My main Question:
Is there any practical effect on performance of CakePHP (i.e. faster view rendering), if support for JS helpers was dropped from the core completely?
My reasoning:
Right now CakePHP has a few classes that allow a programmer to create basic client-side code using PHP, both for things like effects and AJAX requests.
There is some coupling with the View object, which could be degrading to performance.
Considering that a lot of frameworks are moving to a RESTful model and in general it is hard to keep up with the changes of the client-side frameworks, while coupling them with the server-side framework, like CakePHP.
I am wondering if it’s worthwhile to drop support for JS/AJAX and focus on PHP framework patterns. Of course we lose the ability to write some JS code through the helpers, but in my opinion it is still best left to a JS framework.
The benefits are reduced coupling, lighter weight, and possibly improved performance.
JsHelper is going to be removed from core in 3.0 anyway 🙂 I doubt there be any major performance enhancement. The main reason behind the decision is the php wrapper functions to generated js code have very limited functionality and sooner or later you will find out its gets in your way rather than speeding up development. So it’s decided to remove the JsHelper and reduce the code to maintain.