What's the state of Laravel right now? Is it gaining adoption?

Pre 2015, I rolled my own PHP framework. I eventually decided I should take the time to learn a modern framework and narrowed my choices down to Django & Laravel. Ended up going with Django; just curious to see what I missed out on.

If all the PHP nay-sayers used Laravel, the public opinion toward PHP would shift dramatically to be more favorable. It's a modern framework that makes using PHP a true joy, as opposed to the wrangling we had with PHP pre-5.4.

It pretty much ships with everything you need to build an app: scaffolding, migrations, authentication, middleware, templating, caching. Most of getting up and running is really configuring a bunch of settings that takes virtually no time at all.

I'm a huge Laravel fan. They also have a slimmed down version called Lumen, which is pretty much specifically for APIs. Lumen stays up-to-date with Laravel, so you get the benefits of both worlds there.

For some reason, PHP is not just a language, it's a spirit of writing bad software.

A few weeks back I needed to port some crypto from Laravel to Go. I did not have too much trouble – apart the strange usage of Rijndael-256 that Laravel had until one version or two ago. When I looked at the way they were using keys to encrypt data, I realized that they were directly using "application private key". Is that bad? It shouldn't, but Laravel makes sure all the keys it generates are ASCII, for copy/pasting convenience. What happens if you're using a 256-bit key that can be represented with ASCII? The key space is 10^20 times smaller (the entropy of a byte in the key goes from 256 to 62!). That's been a thing in the most "modern framework" in PHP for more than three years. I'm far from being a security professional, but spending one hour on one file was enough to find a basic security issue. Let's just say we're not writing code with Laravel anymore.

I must mention that Taylor Otwell (the author) was extremely fast for fixing the problem. He is probably among the best open source project maintainers I know, and desserves to live off this work on Laravel.

Here is the commit: https://github.com/laravel/framework/commit/370ae34d41362c3a...

Having bounced around from Zend Framework, ZF2, Yii, Code Igniter, and Symfony until landing on Laravel pretty early on- I can say it's the only reason I still do some projects in PHP at all.

Frankly, writing web apps in Laravel is damn near a joy compared to the rest. We still do most of our big stuff with Java or Python and async/scripty stuff in Node, but a fair number of web apps that would've been Spring Framework by default a few years back have been very quickly whipped up in Laravel.

We've launched pretty heavy traffic sites in the last few years that have utilized Elastic Beanstalk, SQS, Elastic Search, and a whole host of other goodies that integrate very easily with Laravel.

It's got the most github stars of any php project ever, so there's that.

It's hard to say which project is more popular based on the number of stars, pull requests, issues, contributors, releases, etc.

Both Laravel and Symfony are the leading PHP frameworks and they're both very popular.

https://github.com/laravel (framework org)

https://github.com/illuminate (Laravel components org)

https://github.com/symfony (framework+components org)

Notably, there is also a difference between the laravel/laravel and laravel/framework -- one has the core code and the other is the public face of the project. Looking at only the former will skew their appearance.

Furthermore, Laravel heavily uses/wraps core Symfony packages (eg: console, http-kernel, routing, process, translation, etc).

Competition between the two is definitely occurring, which is a good thing as they are both comprehensive and modern PHP frameworks.

Laravel has a ton of community around it. I haven't ever found it lacking.

From what I've seen, it's becoming the most popular PHP framework out there.

Disclaimer: this is just my feeling based on people I've talked to and talks I've seen, and not backed by any hard data.

I use Yii2, I tried Laravel and it seemed to me like it's cut corners, that if you go beyond the meat of your CRUD app you find stuff is missing or not well engineered. Not so for Yii2.

I too have hit limits of what Laravel does, but for me this is actually a good thing. I think Laravel handles most of the drudge work and then leaves things open for me to do business/app-specific things my own way.

Of course this is subjective, as everyone draws the line of "how much do I want my libraries/framework to do for me vs. how much do I want to do myself" in a different place.

I've had the opposite reaction to Yii/Laravel. Coming from a heavy .NET/Java background that utilizes similar architecture patterns, it was quite easy to wrap my head around. When you get used to the IoC/Service Provider architecture you realize you can extend (mostly) any part of the framework to do whatever you want.

Link for the official site: https://spark.laravel.com

Spark and Laravel are a super good combo to start an app with, I personally think php's ease of deployment (plus how cheap Laravel Forge is) blows rails out of the water.

Ok, we changed the URL to that from http://learninglaravel.net/laravel-spark-10-is-now-available, which has less information.

Do laravel php projects "just work" like regular PHP might on inexpensive shared hosting? Or do you need a custom setup similar to all these js node / react projects seem to require?

Just throwing it out there, you can put a Node.js application on Heroku with essentially zero custom setup. Granted, more expensive than shared hosting, but if you value your time at all then the time savings are huge (especially compared to a VPS).

You need to install Composer, the PHP package manager, and then install it, but there aren't a whole lot of OS dependencies there. You don't have to install node, then npm, then... ad nauseum. You just drop a composer binary on there, and then run composer install, and it installs the app dependencies.

I personally find it much less headache-inducing than NPM, but I think practically, they're about the same in terms of what they do.

What you described is literally the same process. No need to arbitrarily bash other programming languages or ecosystems.

PHP:

(1) Install PHP (2) Install Composer (3) Run 'composer install' to download dependencies

Node:

(1) Install Node.js (2) Install npm (3) Run 'npm install' to download dependencies

Well he did refer to most shared hosting which do usually come with php already installed, and you may not have sudo. installing composer is simply curling a phar file, or you could even bundle it into your repository if you want to, im really not sure what to tell you.

Has anyone seen in the documentation how they are handling pricing in the long term? I.e., if $299 is for the lifetime of 1.0 releases/upgrades, or something else?

This looks pretty great! Are there similar offerings other languages, or as open-source software?

Why not go the whole hog (or Elephant) and call it Hadoop?

because this isn't Apache Spark?

really like this. Always thought of building a similar app but here it is already. For $99, it is a steal :)