Why I love Laravel (2022)

I&#x27;ve been working with Laravel since &#x27;13 and PHP since &#x27;99.<p>Both just keeps becoming better and better to me. Recent years of needed improvement and feature development of PHP, keeps me happily invested in continuing with PHP as well.<p>I tried NodeJS&#x2F;Typescript for a couple of years, between &#x27;21 and &#x27;23 - I never learned to like it and leaving the community was the best decision for my mental health in a software development context.

I have about 7 years of professional Laravel experience. I think it&#x27;s quite slick! There is one aspect I haven&#x27;t seen mentioned here that frustrates me: the community is quite eager to make new shiny things and forget about existing things. I feel the core framework doesn&#x27;t get a lot of love anymore, and the same for some other packages. Something like Homestead got introduced as a huge thing, but got relatively quickly replaced with Sail and Valet it kind of seems. (Yes, they have a bit different corners, but I would say it doesn&#x27;t justify a complete package) For authentication you have multiple packages that were introduced as the holy grail but now sit in an awkward spot with each other, and similar for frontend things packages.<p>Another small frustration for me is all the huge adjectives being used: - &quot;Laravel Horizon provides a beautiful dashboard ... &quot;<p><pre><code> - &quot;Laravel Jetstream is a beautifully designed application... &quot; - &quot;Laravel Octane supercharges your application&#x27;s performance...&quot; - &quot;Laravel Prompts is a PHP package for adding beautiful and user-friendly forms ... &quot; - &quot;Laravel Reverb brings blazing-fast and scalable real-time WebSocket ...&quot; - &quot;Laravel Sanctum provides a featherweight authentication system ... &quot; - &quot;Laravel Telescope makes a wonderful companion ...&quot; - &quot;In other words, Valet is a blazing fast Laravel development environment ...&quot; </code></pre> I think it would we wise to do a bit of a cleanup and merging of official packages, and to not forget about the core framework. I think Symfony shows you can still do great additions even after many years like Targeted Value Resolvers [0]<p>You can see all the official packages clicking the &quot;Ecosystem&quot; button in the header of laravel.com<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;symfony.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;new-in-symfony-6-3-targeted-value-resolvers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;symfony.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;new-in-symfony-6-3-targeted-value-r...</a>

Laravel has been amazing for a long time. I heard its &#x27;convention over configuration&#x27; approach was inspired by Rails, and the ecosystem is competitive with anything.<p>For small to medium web projects, the benefits of having JS across the stack has kept me from using Laravel again. That doesn&#x27;t apply to all projects, though, and I still love it.<p>Waiting for the next thing. Toying with Deno Deploy (no association).

I&#x27;ve been working with React, Vue, Nuxt&#x2F;Next, even some ASP.net... Somehow, I keep coming back to Laravel when creating a new dynamic project. Whenever I setup a new project in other frameworks, I get exhausted afterwards, I had this great idea I wanted to try out, but after the setup, I lost all motivation.<p>It&#x27;s different with Laravel, because the setup is so much quicker and it has everything I need preconfigured out of the box. I don&#x27;t mind writing PHP, my heart loves C# but I&#x27;ve worked with PHP for almost a decade now. The best thing is, that I can STILL use Vue if I want (and I very often do) through Laravel Breeze.

I used to use silex a microframework from symfony.<p>I really liked the limited scope. It’s gone, and they said just use symfony. It’s a jump there are too many knobs, and even though I kinda know what’s going on it can be overwhelming.<p>My summer project is to try larael.<p>I’ve dealt with python,perl and java sites but always come back to php… I know it gets a lot of flack but I kinda like it.

Laravel with Livewire Volt is fire. This is like how Python used to be during Java days and when pg wrote the famous essay.

PHP tends to be a red flag for security specialists. When talking to other technologists I tend to get eyebrows if I mention building a product in PHP. Most of the damage is done by Wordpress, unfortunately. I think Laravel is a boon for no-nonsense rapid application development.

I think loving your tools is good. While there&#x27;s no framework that&#x27;s _better_ than the language, there are ones that are worse than the language they are written in (Grails comes to mind).<p>I just don&#x27;t _want_ to work with PHP, at all. But it I had to I would prefer to enjoy the tooling.

Was there some particular event (new release, announcement, etc.) that has prompted the ton of Laravel references I&#x27;m seeing on X and elsewhere very recently?

Many people praise the PHP-native model of mixing HTML with server-side code (Dynamic HTML if I remember correctly), and rightfully so for many use cases.<p>But I wonder why no other languages has implemented this model, not even Python which is used for almost everything.<p>Templating is not the same thing as the language in the template is normally not the complete host language, and JSP is quite old and did not even support Java 8 the last time I tried :&#x2F;

&gt; Being able to scaffold out user logins immediately<p>I still don&#x27;t get why Rails doesn&#x27;t have this out of the box.

Stuck on a php 7.2 app at work, but we do use Laravel Valet (easy php, nginx, dns, and ssl on mac), and Eloquent, and they&#x27;re great<p>Watched a course on Livewire, and really looking forward to using it in the future

&gt; I wonder sometimes why more people don’t use Laravel (or similar frameworks in other languages)<p>They do. Most people do. If anyone is serious about putting a project up they use frameworks.

I had a good experience making things with Laravel but the downsides of php are still there for you to feel when you&#x27;re coding with it<p>I&#x27;d rather use something else in 2024

The author asks<p>&gt; I wonder sometimes why more people don’t use Laravel (or similar frameworks in other languages: Rails or Adonis)<p>these frameworks, and other similar ones, often assume that<p>1. there is some sort of UI or frontend<p>2. there is a relational database that the app is connecting to<p>3. there is some sort of auth, based on usernames and passwords<p>with the stuff I do at work, these assumptions are almost always incorrect.<p>(edited grammar)

Are you French? Seems like the only place where PHP is still popular is France because of Symfony.<p>But for the rest I agree, coming from Rails and now working in Typescript: Rails is way faster for building stuff, but building scalable apps in a team that scale without a typed language is way more complicated