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Why Laravel?

So, after you read my first blog post, you can see, that I'm a strong believer in the use of frameworks. But there are so many frameworks out there! So why did I choose Laravel out of all of the possibilities?

At the time that I was choosing a framework, there were several main players:

  • CodeIgniter
  • Symfony
  • CakePHP
  • Zend
  • Yii
  • And many more ...

Don't get me wrong, all of these frameworks are good and have their benefits but these were some of the leading factors that pushed me away from the other ones.

The fate of CodeIgniter was somewhat questionable. Around the time I started developing some of my projects, the main company that was supporting it was abandoning ship so I wasn't too sure about the status / livelihood of it at that point because of that, and it was built for an older version of PHP and from what I had read, the code wasn't updated to make use of the newer features which made it so that this framework was not the one for me.

I had tried both Symfony and Yii before, but I got confused in them. There was stuff that magically worked (which is awesome) and stuff that you had to do. I ended up scrapping those because I never really got into the flow of working with those.

I had a friend who was friends with the creator of CakePHP he got some decent say into what was going on. However, he also said that it felt and was very bloated which immediately deterred me from using it.

Which brings me to Laravel. I started playing with it back in the day of Laravel 3. After a little ramping up, it just clicked with me. At the time I was just starting up a freelance project and decided it was the best approach because it does follow the "Model View Controller" approach, and it was starting to gain a little bit of steam in the PHP development community. The thing that really struck me was how flexible it was. I could literally just "plug stuff in" and it works. Or, if I don't like how one thing is configured in the main framework, no problem, I can tweak it in my own area to better suit my needs!

The best part about it is that they supported closures! For those of you who do not know what closures are, they are essentially ways of scoping things into a function call. With Laravel, if there is a value at that point in time, it will just use the value otherwise it will call the function (even an anonymous function) in order to derive the required value(s). This was a huge plus for me! It means I can easily inject more logic as I need to.

After that Laravel 4 came out. I was hesitant! I started using it (and composer) for the first time and for me, it was a nightmare! Sure, part of it was me being new to using composer and how the library dependencies worked. But, after a few days of struggling, and several bug fixes later, I started working and enjoying Laravel 4 as much as I did Laravel 3.

After the initial ramp up on Laravel 4, I found myself excited to code! And, now that I knew how composer worked, I could make my own packages to help other developers using Laravel! I was on cloud nine! That was when I built 4 different packages for Laravel:

  • Asset Processor - easy cache-busting, pre-processor and minification script for all CSS and JavaScript objects
  • Layout View - easy way to set up different "layouts" and redirect to the correct one depending on the situation / settings
  • Feed Reader - a simple RSS feed reader to pull information into your application
  • Revisable - using the built-in soft-deletes that Laravel had, allowing you to maintain history of model's data that have changed

Then they came out with Laravel 4.1 which required lots of changes to your existing code but it did feel like it was working better. I took that as an opportunity to build up Virtual Pet Directory. And did it ever feel good to be coding.

Now here I stand mid-November and Laravel 5.1 is out and guess what? Long Term Support! Taylor Otwell from Laravel has now said "this is our best incarnation of the framework, we will now be supporting it for the future". For a developer, and an owner of a site, this is a huge win. It means I can now code with confidence that if there are bugs, they will be resolved and pushed forward in new releases.

Over the last 3 years, Laravel's core community has jumped in between a few sites. They started directly on the main Laravel domain, and now finally reside over on Laracasts. What is Laracasts you may ask? Well, Laracasts is an incredible resource made by Jeffery Way, who is a Laravel enthusiast and an amazing teacher. Through this site, he teaches things such as best practices, cool new features of both Laravel and PHP. He has several in depth breakdowns of what is actually going on in the Laravel framework and it is just an invaluable resource for anyone starting out. And, if you still have questions about how to do stuff in the framework, then all you need to do is write on the discussion forums and a lot of people are willing to help you out.

Laravel is still actively being developed and has a large number of contributors who all do their best to improve it with commits going in each day!

So, to conclude I have a few reasons why I chose Laravel for my primary framework and they are:

  • It follows all of the best practices that are currently out there
  • Active community who are all making their own plugins to make the framework better
  • Learning curve ramp up significantly reduced if you use Laracasts
  • It just feels right when coding

Thanks for reading :)

Posted in laravel

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