Sounds legit.

Can you make it an Enterprise Bean?

Not sure what financing applications you develop. But what you suggest wouldn’t pass a code review in any financial-related project I saw.

Using integers for currency-related calculations and formatting the output is no dirty hack, it’s industry standard because floating-point arithmetic is, on contemporary hardware, never precise (can’t be, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754 ) whereas integer arithmetic (or integers used to represent fixed-point arithmetic) always has the same level of precision across all the range it can represent. You typically don’t want to round the numbers you work with, you need to round the result ;-) .

I used PHP voluntarily. 22 years ago there wasn’t much choice. Java hosting options were expensive, Perl options were more expensive than PHP, C# didn’t exist (this was the same year it came out!), Python 2 wasn’t commonly installed by default on Linux distributions etc. No cloud, no Node.JS. If you had access to Windows server you could use VBScript - if you targeted Internet Explorer (versions 4 and 5 were dominant, 6 was new, it was the most popular internet browser at the time) you could use VBScript for both server-side and client-side scripting. Java applets were a thing. But if you didn’t need that, PHP was the most accessible option. And since many hosting providers gave you similar versions of PHP and its libraries, you knew what could work and what not and that you could move your website from one hosting provider to another.