211–220 of 262 posts
I met Taylor a few years ago at a conference we were both speaking at. Coming from the iOS world, I had no idea who he was. "So, what do you work with?" "PHP mainly", he said. I replied "That sucks, sorry man." ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That's kind of a mean thing to say. Maybe that's what your shrug meant?
I thought Laravel was dead. Well looks like some people still like to use these slow and bloated frameworks. I cant say i miss the PHP ecosystem of bloat.
I'll take the bait. Laravel is far from dead; it's more popular than ever. The older versions that you might be familiar with have seen a lot of improvements over the last couple of years. They're fairly aggressive with deprecating older versions of PHP, while still supporting LTS versions. Its ecosystem is really flexible, and generally has great solutions for anything web-related with easy configuration. I haven't…
It's been few years, but last time I tried it, the first thing it did was pulling close to 100 dependencies. I worked on few fairly large codebases (Symfony, Nette) and those were never even close to that. I realise it's not a good metric, but it really felt like an NPM project.
Has this somehow changed?
As a solo bootstrapped SaaS founder that literally relies on my app to pay my rent and food, I owe my sanity to Laravel. I've been doing web development for 10+ years. Nothing else understands the needs of a business owner AND solo programmer like Laravel does. I worked with Python (Flask/Django) for (4+ years) longer than I worked with Laravel (only 1 year), and yet I'm already 10x more productive in Laravel than I…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love hearing about developer experiences by solo devs. As a potential solo dev, I was actually looking to go the Spring Boot route. I think Java has gone in a better direction the past few years, and I prefer it over PHP due to static typing, functional programming (to a point), and the tooling. Spring Boot seems to provide a lot of the same development productivity. My only other experience is with Rails and Djang…
I also find these decisions very hard. I switched from NodeJS to Spring Boot some 5 years ago when I found that the JS community moved faster than my clients could pay me to keep up to date. It has been great to make apps in Java with Thymeleaf, until I wanted to add dynamic frontends (a lot of advantages vanished) or when I tried to put Java on my CV. I am now considering switching to .NET and Angular. I would be ha…
I'm just now learning (week 2) Laravel after coming from using other custom frameworks for years. For the record I have my own framework with a fully featured ORM of it's own and 99% unit test coverage for said ORM which is a fork of one my friend started 15 years ago and I have contributed to for several years. We started it before Laravel existed and in many ways it's exactly like Laravel. [ https://github.com/Dive…
The PHP League Skeleton is only for packages. On the other hand, you use Laravel to create full applications so it's not applicable.
Even if somehow the Skeleton is so good its structure might be used for applications, we're under no obligation to follow PHP League's rules because they're just a private organization, not an authoritative source for standards such as PHP itself or PSR standards.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When learning cool bird facts I really enjoy listening to people talk - but when trying to debug or learn a new framework I absolutely insist on written documentation. I need to be able to re-read paragraphs or segue to other topics briefly and then return which is incompatible with anything audio-visual. The existence of Laracasts was actually a strong disincentive for me to go with Laravel and I've been quite happy…
So you decided not to use framework because there is website with video courses about it? Interesting reasoning. Isnt there website with videos about the other framework?
As a solo bootstrapped SaaS founder that literally relies on my app to pay my rent and food, I owe my sanity to Laravel. I've been doing web development for 10+ years. Nothing else understands the needs of a business owner AND solo programmer like Laravel does. I worked with Python (Flask/Django) for (4+ years) longer than I worked with Laravel (only 1 year), and yet I'm already 10x more productive in Laravel than I…
There's nothing in your list which doesn't have an equivalent in the Rails and Django ecosystems. Laravel is just another MVC framework built with a dynamically-typed scripting language. Rails, Django, Laravel - take your pick. Same wine in a similar bottle.
Personally, I liked Laravel when I was first investigating it years ago, but was always a touch put off by the pervasive "I am beautiful, adore me" undercurrent throughout its design, documentation, and even comments. I'll be the first to admit that's not a rational critique. Having said that, though, Laravel is relatively unusual among major frameworks in that it doesn't seem to have been developed in tandem with a…
> I'm not convinced that smaller PHP projects, at least, might not be better off without frameworks at all Uh having experienced the old pre-codeigniter php, I don't really recommended it. Without proper controller separation (using twig as rendering engine for example) it poses the risk for the business logic to be tangled with view. Not to mention that it's hard to do routing with native php, except the simple [fol…
Well, you should also quote the part in my comment about "use Composer to pull in specific packages that you really need." :) I'm not suggesting "roll everything on your own," necessarily: if you want to use Twig, or another templating engine, add that as a Composer package. (Personally, I'd just write a small pure PHP template class to handle this and trust myself not to be a dingus, but if I were on a team that might change the calculus here.)
> Not to mention that it's hard to do routing with native PHP...
Again, you don't have to roll your own here; you can include something like FastRoute or even Symfony's router as a routing engine.
I'm not saying you should avoid absolutely all libraries. Laravel is built on top of a lot of Symfony libraries, after all! For a project I've been noodling with slowly, I'm using my own "pure PHP" template engine, but I'm using FastRoute for routing, Doctrine DBAL (although not the ORM) for database access, Monolog for logging, PHP Debug Bar to get a lot of debugging info in development, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The biggest benifit to something like Laravel is that a new developer to your team can step in and know where everything should be and how it should generally work without asking. There is good documentation so you dont have to write that for your foundational code, just your business logic. A bunch of bespoke packages strung together with no logic does not provide that. You can surely look up how one package works b…
I can see how it's seen as a benefit, but the flipside is that you're teaching your developers Laravel, not PHP. They assume whatever they do, they do in a good way because it's Laravel that does it which is great, but it abstracts actual knowledge. It's like if a developer uses SQL exclusively through an ORM and DBAL, how much can they be expected to know about the workings of SQL performance, indexes, etc. I also f…