Recently I was faced with a task of choosing a best PHP framework that would work as infrastructure for a few of my personal projects and also for the startup I'm working for.
I've got some experience with Ruby on Rails and loved the simplicity of making web apps with it. Ruby on Rails takes a special kind of dedication and patience to begin coding with and so it would be hard to find a collaborator in the long run.
I've looked through a few dozen PHP frameworks that are out there, CakePHP, ZEND, CodeIgniter, new frameworks on Github and other open source repositories. I am sure any of them could be a great fit for big and complex tasks that I want to accomplish, but I wanted something simple. Something that even a non-coder could learn quickly.
After downloading and testing lots and lots of frameworks, from 50Kb in size to dozen megabytes, from super simple flat-file XML to Mega-Giga database driven, I have arrived at something worth more of my attention.
I've stumbled upon Laravel framework. A super simple framework for people who want to get their web applications made quickly without sacrificing efficiency and speed.
Why I liked Laravel right away? What's so special about it that I fell in love with this framework? Here's the beauty of it:
- MVC
- RESTful controllers
- It is extremely clean. No Spaghetti Code. Use only what your application needs
- Amazing templating system (like Mustache)
- Bundles (like plugins or extensions or like ruby gems)
- Automatic pagination
- Authentification out of the box! (CodeIgniter was behind on this one)
- Artisan command line tool that simplifies lots of tasks like migrations, installing bundles, your own tasks, unit testing, etc.
- Extremely detailed documentation (helpful for a noob like me!)
Which framework are you using and how do you think Laravel could leverage your production? Leave your response in the comments below, also follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/msurguy