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.
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.
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.