Laravel: An intuitive, scalable, and modern framework for PHP applications
February 07, 2019
Laravel: An intuitive, scalable, and modern framework for PHP applications
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Laravel PHP Framework
Laravel is primarily being used as the framework that we build some of our internal applications on when we don't need a full CMS. It allows us to rapidly create services that we can integrate or expand on later with ease. I have also consulted on Laravel implementations and provided support for Laravel applications for external clients.
- Laravel utilizes the best possible PHP standards and coding practices.
- Laravel uses many widely-accepted community libraries and builds upon them, rather than re-inventing everything.
- Laravel has many components available from the community and is extremely easy to build custom components for, either with custom code or by integrating existing third-party PHP libraries.
- Laravel is flexible enough to power pretty much any kind of application I can imagine.
- Laravel is not the easiest framework to grasp for new developers (even though it probably IS the best framework for a new developer to learn because it will teach many good, modern development practices).
- Laravel requires more configuration and glue code than some other frameworks I've used, such as CakePHP. CakePHP relies on convention over configuration, whereas Laravel is more explicit. I think Laravel's way is ultimately more flexible and scalable, even though it's less terse. Perhaps there is room for somewhat of a middle ground.
- Laravel's community doesn't have the level of contribution of some more widespread PHP frameworks or CMSs, though it has the benefit of being built on Composer and being able to utilize any existing PHP library, so it's not much of an issue.
- 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.
Originally, it was a decision between Zend, CodeIgniter, and CakePHP for me. I chose CakePHP and used it as my main PHP framework for at least a couple of years before noticing and giving Laravel a fair try. Ultimately I selected Laravel because I felt it fit with my preferred development style, it utilized many of the modern best-practices I wanted to follow, and I felt that it allowed me to build better things in less time that seemed more maintainable.
I have used, and still do use, Symfony directly for certain things, but I think of it (and use it) more as a code library than as a full application framework. When I'm building a web application, I tend to prefer Laravel.
I have used, and still do use, Symfony directly for certain things, but I think of it (and use it) more as a code library than as a full application framework. When I'm building a web application, I tend to prefer Laravel.