Laravel PHP Framework vs. Oracle WebCenter Sites

Laravel is ideally suited for fluent PHP developers who want a framework that can be used to both rapidly prototype web applications as well as support scalable, enterprise-level solutions. I think where it is less ideal is where the client has an expectation of using a certain CMS, or of having a certain experience on the admin side that would perhaps be better suited to a full CMS such as Drupal or WordPress. Additionally, for developers who don't want to write PHP code, Laravel may not be the best solution.

Incentivized

Oracle WebCenter Sites is very well suited to presenting marketing content in all shapes and forms, including mobile, an in a corporate web site. Oracle WebCenter Sites can also manage small product catalogs easily. Important things to consider when selecting a CMS:

• How important is the ease with which my business users update content?
• How often are updates made?
• How distributed are my business contributors?
• How important is preview in my organization's workflow and publishing process?

• Many libraries available which simplify integration of SaaS APIs within your application (eg, MailChimp, Mandrill, Stripe, Authorize.net)
• Pre-packaged tools to facilitate common tasks when building applications (eg, User Authentication and Authorization, Background Jobs, Queues, etc)
• Support for a broad set of technologies out of the box (eg, PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB, MemcacheD, BeanstalkD, Redis, etc)

Incentivized

• Easy-to-use content authoring and design tools for business users.
• Segmentation based on implicit (behavioral) or explicit (known user or characteristics) criteria or a combination of the two.
• Flexible rules engine for creation of customer segments and recommendations, enabling delivery of targeted content and campaigns.

• Significant learning curve. You cannot be an expert in a week. It takes many experimentations to properly understand the underlying concept. We ourselves learned it by using it on the job.
• Too much to soak in. Laravel is in everything. Any part of backend development you wish to do, Laravel has a way to do that. It is great, but also overwhelming at the same time.
• Vendor lock in. Once you are in Laravel, it would not be easy to switch to something else.
• Laracasts (their online video tutorials) are paid :( I understand the logic behind it, but I secretly wish it would be free.
• The eloquent ORM is not my recommendation. Let's say you want to write a join, and based on the result you wish to create two objects. If you use Laravel to do automatic joins for you, Laravel internally actually makes two calls to database and creates your two object rather than making one join call and figuring out the results. This makes your queries slow. For this reason, I use everything except eloquent from Laravel. I rather write my own native queries and control the creation of objects then rely on Laravel to do it. But I am sure with time Laravel will make fewer calls to DB.

Incentivized

• Creating new content is not so easy
• Publishing is not trivial
• In my opinion documentation is weak
• I think there are cheaper solutions then WCS

A valuable tool for enabling marketers and business users to easily create and manage contextually relevant social and interactive online experiences across multiple channels on a global scale to drive sales and loyalty. It also allows multi-site management (in fact Sites) using the assets and template developed, without having to re-implement again for each individual site.

The WebCenter Sites Support team is extremely good and very responsive to client needs. They are quick to resolve Level 1 issues and when escalated to Level 2, the team makes every effort to keep the client informed.

Supporting unit testing is bigger plus point in Laravel than any other framework. Developing with Laravel is much easier. Other frameworks have value in market, but Laravel has taken the lead in popularity among PHP developers in recent years. The large community supports you if you have problems. Using Laravel, integration became easy with third-party libraries, but it was costly too.

Incentivized

There are lot of WCM products available in the market, some free and some licensed. But for a organisation using more Oracle products and on Java technology, WCS is the best in class, for intranet and internet needs. It has everything which is required for a web application. Also it can be well integrated with other platforms with Oracle Document Cloud/Oracle Content/Oracle Identity Manager and a lot more. Its a well integrated product. It can also be integrated with social media using a community plugin. It also comes with its own search and analytics tools. The templates are pure JSP and can be easily coded by Java developers using the development guide. Its based on Java, so writing custom applications and integrating is easy

Incentivized

• Laravel allows us to rapidly prototype and build complete, scalable applications internally, which saves us time and allows us to have internal tools that fit out precise needs. We use Symfony for a similar purpose, but Laravel is an even higher-level framework that we find saves us substantially more time when building many types of web applications.
• Laravel solves many of the underlying concerns of building a large application (such as authentication, authorization, secure input handling) in the right ways. It saves us from handling those low-level concerns ourselves, potentially in a way that could take a lot of time or sets us up for issues in the future. It's tough to assign an ROI to this, but I'm sure it has prevented issues and saved time, which both have an impact on our financial situation.

Incentivized

• It has alleviated some of the burden on our IT staff.
• It has allowed our Marketing department to be more hands-on with content changes, and they have more flexibility with the types of changes and how often they make them.

Incentivized