The funny thing is that Laravel basically took the Ruby on Rails philosophy and applied it to PHP. Just looking at their site it's clear they have a very similar vision: simple, fast and fun. One can always find differences but the basic principles are the same.

IMO this is great kudos to the Laravel guys, whatever language I use I always look for the tooling that follows the KISS principle. In PHP you have Laravel, in Java/SCala you have PLay, etc.

I need to add that, because of the job, I did a lot of PHP, Ruby, Java, Javascript with many different frameworks and I can say that Rails is still the best for me when it comes to dev experience if you need to move fast. Laravel has come a long way but it's still not at the same level of maturity in terms of tooling and ecosystem. As a bonus with Rails you use Ruby which is designed for programmer productivity and fun.

Anyway, whatever language/framework you use just keep it simple, that's the most important decision you can make for the health of your project.

Fast forward to now. After 10 years there is https://qbix.com/platform . If you're reading this and know PHP / LAMP, I would encourage people here to try it and give me feedback. I've never really spent time growing the community or popularizing it like Laravel. But at every turn, it's made decisions that are as close to PHP and standards as possible.

In particular, the Db module may be better than Doctrine, for example.

I was a huge fan of PyroCMS which was based on Code Igniter. I stopped using it when the all of the JS frameworks exploded. I went back last year to check on them and found out they moved to Laravel.

https://pyrocms.com/

The community since then has grown by leaps and bounds. Good to see the Pyro team still out there making a great CMS.

honestly its ok to have a different opinion, different people prefer different things.

From the home page of a few other frameworks:

Django: "The web framework for perfectionists with deadlines."

Flask: "Web development, one drop at a time"

Express: "Fast, unopinionated, minimalist web framework for Node.js"

Pyramid: "You need a Python web framework that supports your decisions, by artisans for artisans."

Why is it clean? Build an application with Laravel and you'll find out. :) The documentation and community are excellent. I've used many frameworks across many different languages, and (imo) it really is very nice to work in.

It's funny how the most negativity comes from people with very little experience, or at least recent experience, in the thing that they don't like.

Working with both Laravel and Rails will make it clearer that they try to follow the same principles of convention over configuration and programmer happiness :).

Then there is Laravel, why "artisans?" The word generally means pre-industrial. In my mind, that evokes devs doing edits on live code. Also, "Laravel" sounds like something to do with larvae.

Then there's Drupal, which for the longest time was "community plumbing," which did match the experience of having to call someone in for mysterious specialist emergencies.

Also, they love to invent their own names for existing things. For example, they named a folder with interfaces as "Contracts", although there are only interfaces.

You are using "Ruby on Rails" as some sign of quality, but if it uses magic and static methods like Laravel, I would consider it ugly too. Also, I remember reading somewhere that they were hotpatching imported modules. Luckily in PHP you cannot do it.

The fake case against Laravel that never dies . The truth is found in the docs: https://laravel.com/docs/5.8/facades

> Facades provide a "static" interface to classes that are available in the application's service container. Laravel ships with many facades which provide access to almost all of Laravel's features. Laravel facades serve as "static proxies" to underlying classes in the service container, providing the benefit of a terse, expressive syntax while maintaining more testability and flexibility than traditional static methods.

There are way too many magic things happening under the hood for my taste.

https://laravel.com/docs/5.8/facades

"Contract" is not a term they invented; it's a term from "design by contract programming," and Laravel enforces the "contracts" through interfaces.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_contract

(And, no, they did not invent the term "facade," either.)

Rails does take a lot of established concepts like MVC and mangles them pretty badly, but the Rails version of MVC works well in practice if you're willing to overlook how unconventional it is. The beauty is not in the adherence to dogma, but the day-to-day experience of using it when you know how it works.

It takes surprisingly little code to do some complex things in Rails. I'm working with GraphQL now and it's stupid easy to build out an API with Rails.

Laravel might seem all sorts of "wrong" to someone who has expectations of "how things should be", but the Laravel way, when accepted for what it is, works. It provides structure and cohesion which in the PHP world is in extremely short supply.

For example I wrote a course on building a SAAS app with Flask. It's available at: https://buildasaasappwithflask.com/

It covers everything about user registration, profiles, subscription billing, 1 time billing, invoicing, and about 50 other things you would likely want to do in a SAAS app or any application really.

The course comes with the source code along with 15+ hours of video explaining every line of code in stages, life time free updates and life time support for close to half the price of what Spark charges just for the source code for 1 site license (with the Flask course you can use the code in however many projects you want).

Spark's business model seems interesting though. I don't use it personally but do you just get the source code and nothing else? How do they limit you to 1 site if you end up with a local copy of the scaffolding / code base?

What can you tell about your experience building this course, is it worth it ? rewarding ? Did you find difficult to promote it ? what are the main channels to adquiere customers ?

And if you don't mind sharing some numbers, how many people purchased it so far?

I'd like to get an idea on how profitable (or not) and personally rewarding are type of courses, to motivate myself and write one of these one day.

thank you!

edit: I'm thinking maybe that was too many questions, sorry if so, you could create a "meta-course" on explaining all these things and I'd buy it! :)))

I built a number of SAAS apps (and apps that had similar functionality) for a few freelance clients. Then I eventually thought "hmm, lots of repeated patterns here, maybe I can make this into a course", so then I made the course.

As for the process. Funny you mention it. The changelog just had me on as a guest for their "backstage" podcast last week where we talked about content creation and the process of recording courses. That's at: http://changelog.com/backstage/4

It covers most of your questions but it doesn't cover nitty gritty details on sales figures and revenue. Thousands of people have signed up for the course but I still do quite a bit of freelancing. Freelancing and course creation is my full time job.

I find it really rewarding at a personal level. I just like creating things, but it is a lot of work. It's not just hitting record and being done in 2 days. Expect it to take 3-6 months of full time work to make a course. Then there's having to keep it updated (because tech changes so fast) and ongoing 24/7 support.

Couple people have asked me to make a course on making courses. Maybe one day but at the moment there's still a bunch of technical courses I still want to make, a million blog posts to write (I have 85 draft posts that are unpublished) and some side projects in the works.

Definitively I'll check the podcast, thanks a lot!

I'm currently building another with that library.

[0] https://falconframework.org/

[1] https://klen.github.io/py-frameworks-bench/ or https://github.com/the-benchmarker/web-frameworks

You want the complete opposite; have as many problems solved for you already with battle-tested ways to break out of the happy path when you need to.

Every sufficiently large Flask app becomes a half-assed reinvention of half of Django, except without the hundreds of thousands of eyeballs and man-centuries of bug fixing.

Personally I consider Django without any additional apps less complex than Flask with apps (or "plugins" in Flask jargon) to handle basic stuff like auth.

If performance is a concern, both of them are insufficient and I would rather pick another language like Rust, Go or even Java.

For performance, we are building some parts of our system with Clojure. It feels extremely well suited, albeit with some initial learning curve.

I noticed they have a public repo with a tool that manages a way to download the spark code base.

I'm guessing without a token you can't access whatever code that public tool pulls down, meaning you need an active token to get future updates of the code base? Pretty cool system if that's the case (there's motivation to keep your purchase to receive updates).

I'm not asking to try and rip him off. I was just curious about the mechanism of protecting the download. Sounds like the only real difference here is the download is done over a command line tool instead of a web interface. Other than that, it's no different than serving a protected file?

I can't say I enjoyed working on any of those projects compared to the kind of stuff I do now (and how much I've learned since), but I've been remarkably surprised by some more recent codebases, despite the architecture sometimes feeling a little over-engineered (Symfony 2, for an outdated example).

It's not the style of code I enjoy writing at all but I've seen some incredibly clean stuff that would put a lot of Rails apps to shame. And I'd take that PHP over a badly maintained Rails app any day.

I wouldn't use PHP by choice still, but I no longer care to be snobbish about it. People are doing some good stuff in it, just the same as has happened with JS.

It's also use abysmal amounts for RAM for some reason. I managed to use Chrome headless for my app with only 512MB, but not Composer.

[1] https://github.com/hirak/prestissimo

a package distribution system.

Composer suffers some of the same issues NPM does, IMO: it encourages stuff like 'install dependencies at deployment' and "why write it when you can blindly trust someone else's code".

Not everyone who uses PHP uses Composer.

PEAR is an abandoned tool used by no one. Arguing for it to be considered "the" package manager is a really weird fight to pick.

Installing libraries globally is inconvenient for developers. Sadly, most Linux package managers have same problem and do not allow you to install several versions of PHP or Node.

Personally, I wouldn't... I worked with pear and pecl and composer is just far more pleasant to interact with.

https://packagist.org/packages/hirak/prestissimo

Give this package a try, it really worked for me to speed up package management with composer.

I would recommend.