The best modern PHP application framework available.
December 20, 2017
The best modern PHP application framework available.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Laravel PHP Framework
Laravel is used by our developers and engineers to build websites and web applications. The framework provides a lot of support and structure around concepts and tasks that are common in the course of building web applications. The community of Laravel developers in the world is huge and because of that, there are a lot of libraries that can be imported into any Laravel application which offloads complex work that is not necessarily directly related to your business. For these reasons, developers are able to work faster and focus more on your problem domain/business objectives than designing, writing, and testing code for supporting parts that aren't directly related.
- 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)
- Laravel is updated regularly, which is great. However, in order to get the latest features, use the newest 3rd party libraries, have the most current security updates, and ensure that the newest features of PHP are usable, you have to continuously upgrade your Laravel application. This costs time and money, obviously, and if you don't stay on top of the updates you will quickly fall behind. This is the case with any open source software, but it needs to be considered for any team considering using Laravel or any other software.
- Because of the size of the Laravel community, there are a LOT of 3rd party libraries. Some of these are great, some are less than great. Sometimes it's difficult to evaluate the quality of a library, making it difficult to trust many libraries. Developers need to be cautious and thoughtful when considering using new software.
- Because of the rapid development of the Laravel framework, the size of the community, and the simplicity of being able to publish content online - it is very easy to find documentation, tutorials, or other "advice" that is not up to date, or that has outdated information.
- Improved Developer happiness (under-rated quality!)
- Faster turn-around time for projects due to leveraging the framework's built-in features.
- Less time spent building technology that we need, but that has already been developed by the open source community.
In my experience, if a development team is using an MVC framework that's not Laravel, they're doing one of two things:
1. Using an older framework like Code Igniter, CakePHP, or one of the many dozen others
2. Using an in-house system built by one of the (possibly former) team members.
That's if they're using an MVC framework, at all. More often is the case that the development team writing PHP applications for a company is small and inexperienced, and they're slinging code together that just barely works without any sort of structure or regard to future maintenance at all.
Laravel is a framework that is so well documented that it is approachable by inexperienced developers. It's widely used by all levels of developers, and the community is so large, that finding talent to grow your team becomes a much easier proposition. By utilizing Laravel, you're putting into place a base system that is very well understood by many. Bringing new developers up to speed becomes a much less time-intensive task than it used to be when all "frameworks" were built in-house and anyone new to a team had to learn that framework before they could work on a new application.
The older frameworks have fallen out of favor, and while still have a lot of resources available, are not moving forward with technology trends (or are moving forward much more slowly). Laravel has proven that it will stay current with development trends, allowing you to leverage newer technology for your business.
1. Using an older framework like Code Igniter, CakePHP, or one of the many dozen others
2. Using an in-house system built by one of the (possibly former) team members.
That's if they're using an MVC framework, at all. More often is the case that the development team writing PHP applications for a company is small and inexperienced, and they're slinging code together that just barely works without any sort of structure or regard to future maintenance at all.
Laravel is a framework that is so well documented that it is approachable by inexperienced developers. It's widely used by all levels of developers, and the community is so large, that finding talent to grow your team becomes a much easier proposition. By utilizing Laravel, you're putting into place a base system that is very well understood by many. Bringing new developers up to speed becomes a much less time-intensive task than it used to be when all "frameworks" were built in-house and anyone new to a team had to learn that framework before they could work on a new application.
The older frameworks have fallen out of favor, and while still have a lot of resources available, are not moving forward with technology trends (or are moving forward much more slowly). Laravel has proven that it will stay current with development trends, allowing you to leverage newer technology for your business.