10 ms·

Laravel 7

122 points by tpetry 7y ago

hu3 7y ago
> Major framework releases are released every six months... Two major versions with breaking changes per year? This seems a bit too fast paced for my taste. But I haven't used the framework and would love the input of someone that had to maintain a Laravel project for more than a year.
- nicoburns 7y ago
  > Two major versions with breaking changes per year? This seems a bit too fast paced for my taste. They provide LTS releases (similar to Ubuntu). I'd definitely recommend sticking to them for projects that are / will be in maintenance mode. The breaking changes are usually minor, so for actively developed projects, using the regular versions is fine.
  - micael_dias 7y ago
    You can also use https://laravelshift.com/ https://laravelshift.com/. I always manually updated using the documentation upgrade guide and never had a problem which will apply to most people who don't use internal undocumented functions.
- yurishimo 7y ago
  The changes in each major version are pretty small. They’re sticking to semantic versioning now so if there is a major version bump, it’s likely a small change to some internal library that would only be breaking in the technical sense. Plus, this is the pace the framework has adopted for a long time now so most of the devs in the ecosystem are used to doing an upgrade once or twice a year. Generally they’re very quick. < 15 min.
  - wishinghand 7y ago
    > They’re sticking to semantic versioning now I will believe that when I see it. edit: to clarify, historically they've bumped the minor version number whenever they had major changes in the API, and now the major version bumps are usually non-breaking changes. I don't think the team fully understands Semver.
fareesh 7y ago
Laravel is great - makes getting routine things done in PHP a lot less bothersome with the ol' convention over configuration philosophy that Rails introduced. I've used it for several web applications running in production and have always been very pleased with what it has to offer. The documentation is pretty good too.
kyriakos 7y ago
Great work going in this framework, along with Symfony are a driving force for PHP. This is no-bullshit tool for making web sites where most details are thought out. It may be opinionated but if you learn and follow it instead of working against it you can have a super quick turnaround from concept to production.
Raed667 7y ago
I love Laravel and used it for several projects. My only issue with it currently is its landing page. Where I can't easily distinguish Free parts of the ecosystem and Paid parts. And have to go over each component landing page to see the pricing. For example they show Passport which is a free OAuth2 library exactly the same way as Nova which is a pay-per-project admin dashboard.
BilalBudhani 7y ago
Laravel seems to be doing great. The number of improvements in DX and the ecosystem is moving at a nice pace. I often compare it with Ruby On Rails framework (my primary stack) which is unfortunately not focusing much on DX anymore. For instance, Laravel has been consistently improving authentication by providing official packages right into the framework. Whereas, Rails still doesn't have an official gem backed into the framework. The recent change of hands of "devise" gem would have been a great opportunity for Rails to take it over.
- andreygrehov 7y ago
  What is DX?
  - cies 7y ago
    I guess: developer experience
  - putlake 7y ago
    Developer experience
- ksec 7y ago
  The problem with RoR is still a Basecamp Framework. Even though it is used by Github and Shopify. Things like ActionView-Component [1] couldn't be merged because it is not used in Basecamp, even though it is used in production at Github. Auth / Devise as mentioned is another one. Active Storage problem is another one, ( which leads to Paperclip stop being maintained ) [1] https://github.com/github/view_component https://github.com/github/view_component
mici 7y ago
Laravel Airlock is my favorite thing about this release. I already started using it for one of my sites, it makes API authentication so much easier than it used to be with Passport.
oflannabhra 7y ago
One of the most interesting things about the Laravel ecosystem is how an open source project has allowed multiple independent businesses spring up around the core project that facilitate things like management, deployment, etc. I know laravel is not unique in this respect, and that lots of the tooling around it is from Taylor Otwell (founder) but there are lots of others as well. I’ve always been impressed by how developer quality of life is such a high priority goal of Laravel. I think much of its adoption, and the successful businesses that have sprung up around it is a validation that they’ve done that right.
- liveoneggs 7y ago
  the virtuous cycle of small businesses that orbit open source projects are the ultimate measure of its success imho. These are real job creators.
- smartstakestime 7y ago
  do you work with Laravel ... it has not advanced dev quality of life. It has great marketing and has grabbed a % of the dev base so lots of people work with it. It has done nothing better than symfony, codeigniter, Zendframework. I feel it breeds bad coding habbits, many coders like it simplicity but when they use it they implement many inefficient functions, mostly around querying the database. Laravel has this robust query builder api so you have many novices accessing the database through it without understanding what they are doing. I dont really know what "quality of life" is provided by Laravel. Its just another MVC.
  - paulryanrogers 7y ago
    Like Rails it can provide a lot of structure and packages for the routine requirements. It's ORM isn't much better or worse than others I've used. The alternatives remain popular, if less so since Laravel's marketing has kicked in. To each their own.
  - jjeaff 7y ago
    Quality of life is better because you can build so much, so quickly with laravel. There is a ton that laravel can bootstrap for you out of the box and then add to that the very large ecosystem of plugins that has come out of the community.
tpaschalis 7y ago
I've worked with Laravel in the past few months. Having never worked with PHP, I went from eew PHP?! to a delightful, fast-paced development model. It shows that good documentation and listening to your user-base will get an Open Source project really far. It just gets even small things right, nice testing support, database migrations, request validations, events and broadcasting, you name it!
mmmuhd 7y ago
We are ever grateful to Taylor otwel and the team for developing and maintaining Laravel, ever wonder why most of us African web developers use Laravel as a web framework? Because it works and fast without much need for fancy tweaks (here a decent internet is still a luxury in most parts of the continent), Laravel allows you to spring up a decent web app fast without much hassle, you can easily set it up in the cloud and it will be up and running with need for maintenance and site reliability issues. More grease to your elbows Taylor and the rest of the Laravel team.
kugelblitz 7y ago
I've stopped using since Laravel 5.4, switched to Symfony 2.8 up to now (5.0) and recently also Flask or Django (at least for back end). My biggest pains were the facades and also I wasn't a big fan of the Active Records (with the empty classes and only doing autocomplete by regularly generating loads of annotations). Being a freelancer and the increasing popularity, I suppose it's worth taking a look again. Though I'm still a bit hesitant to use it for my own long-term projects, especially since there are so many breaking changes and there are some side projects I won't be able to update for 3 to 12 months while I work freelance or build up new projects. Can anyone share their experience using + updating a Laravel-based website which is at least 2 years old, especially regarding maintainability?
- dzonga 7y ago
  you get a lot of freelancing opportunities using flask ?
  - kugelblitz 7y ago
    No, not really. It was my entry point into Python, now I use Django mostly. PHP opportunities are much more. I like using Symfony, though I also get Laravel or E-Commerce (e.g. Shopware, Spryker) offers. But of course this is because my profile is PHP / JS, so I get these offers. Though Node.js as back end is noticeably increasing.
- justanotherc 7y ago
  I was turned off of Laravel from a bad experience of the very reason you're afraid of it. Back in 2017 I was hired to take over a large Laravel 4.2 project, which included upgrading it to 5.0+ version. The upgrade was a very long, extremely painful experience, and Laravel itself progressed from 5.0 to 5.2 during our upgrade so it was like trying to hit a moving target. I know there is a lot of capability wrapped up in the framework which enables rapid development, but for long lived applications, you're going to spend a not-insignificant amount of your time keeping up with upgrades. So in a sense, the framework itself becomes technical debt. That makes it a bad framework from my point of view. Your code base should not be forced to be so tightly coupled to the framework that you have to spend time updating it to keep up with the framework versions (or get stuck on an old version).
thinkindie 7y ago
two things I noticed: 1) the great majority of features were authored or contributed by Taylor Otwell - in any cases he was the only name next to each feature. How this is sustainable in the long term? 2) it is still using a lot of singletone/static methods and so on, how they can promote some solid testing culture?
samspenc 7y ago
As a long-time PHP developer, I love Laravel, all of its features, and how the community has built around it, but there are a couple of pain points I felt when I used it last year, not sure if these have improved: 1. Very difficult to get running in shared hosting. 2. Feels a bit heavyweight for a SPA (Single Page Application) where the Javascript front-end framework (e.g. Angular, React) is doing most of the work, and the PHP Laravel backend is just processing the CRUD APIs in REST.
- dbbk 7y ago
  For the SPA case they have a slimmed down version called Lumen.
npv789 7y ago
kudos for Taylor Otwell

122 points by tpetry 7y ago

hu3 7y ago

> Major framework releases are released every six months... Two major versions with breaking changes per year? This seems a bit too fast paced for my taste. But I haven't used the framework and would love the input of someone that had to maintain a Laravel project for more than a year.

nicoburns 7y ago
> Two major versions with breaking changes per year? This seems a bit too fast paced for my taste. They provide LTS releases (similar to Ubuntu). I'd definitely recommend sticking to them for projects that are / will be in maintenance mode. The breaking changes are usually minor, so for actively developed projects, using the regular versions is fine.
- micael_dias 7y ago
  You can also use https://laravelshift.com/ https://laravelshift.com/. I always manually updated using the documentation upgrade guide and never had a problem which will apply to most people who don't use internal undocumented functions.
yurishimo 7y ago
The changes in each major version are pretty small. They’re sticking to semantic versioning now so if there is a major version bump, it’s likely a small change to some internal library that would only be breaking in the technical sense. Plus, this is the pace the framework has adopted for a long time now so most of the devs in the ecosystem are used to doing an upgrade once or twice a year. Generally they’re very quick. < 15 min.
- wishinghand 7y ago
  > They’re sticking to semantic versioning now I will believe that when I see it. edit: to clarify, historically they've bumped the minor version number whenever they had major changes in the API, and now the major version bumps are usually non-breaking changes. I don't think the team fully understands Semver.

fareesh 7y ago

Laravel is great - makes getting routine things done in PHP a lot less bothersome with the ol' convention over configuration philosophy that Rails introduced. I've used it for several web applications running in production and have always been very pleased with what it has to offer. The documentation is pretty good too.

kyriakos 7y ago

Great work going in this framework, along with Symfony are a driving force for PHP. This is no-bullshit tool for making web sites where most details are thought out. It may be opinionated but if you learn and follow it instead of working against it you can have a super quick turnaround from concept to production.

Raed667 7y ago

I love Laravel and used it for several projects. My only issue with it currently is its landing page. Where I can't easily distinguish Free parts of the ecosystem and Paid parts. And have to go over each component landing page to see the pricing. For example they show Passport which is a free OAuth2 library exactly the same way as Nova which is a pay-per-project admin dashboard.

BilalBudhani 7y ago

Laravel seems to be doing great. The number of improvements in DX and the ecosystem is moving at a nice pace. I often compare it with Ruby On Rails framework (my primary stack) which is unfortunately not focusing much on DX anymore. For instance, Laravel has been consistently improving authentication by providing official packages right into the framework. Whereas, Rails still doesn't have an official gem backed into the framework. The recent change of hands of "devise" gem would have been a great opportunity for Rails to take it over.

andreygrehov 7y ago
What is DX?
- cies 7y ago
  I guess: developer experience
- putlake 7y ago
  Developer experience
ksec 7y ago
The problem with RoR is still a Basecamp Framework. Even though it is used by Github and Shopify. Things like ActionView-Component [1] couldn't be merged because it is not used in Basecamp, even though it is used in production at Github. Auth / Devise as mentioned is another one. Active Storage problem is another one, ( which leads to Paperclip stop being maintained ) [1] https://github.com/github/view_component https://github.com/github/view_component

mici 7y ago

Laravel Airlock is my favorite thing about this release. I already started using it for one of my sites, it makes API authentication so much easier than it used to be with Passport.

oflannabhra 7y ago

One of the most interesting things about the Laravel ecosystem is how an open source project has allowed multiple independent businesses spring up around the core project that facilitate things like management, deployment, etc. I know laravel is not unique in this respect, and that lots of the tooling around it is from Taylor Otwell (founder) but there are lots of others as well. I’ve always been impressed by how developer quality of life is such a high priority goal of Laravel. I think much of its adoption, and the successful businesses that have sprung up around it is a validation that they’ve done that right.

liveoneggs 7y ago
the virtuous cycle of small businesses that orbit open source projects are the ultimate measure of its success imho. These are real job creators.
smartstakestime 7y ago
do you work with Laravel ... it has not advanced dev quality of life. It has great marketing and has grabbed a % of the dev base so lots of people work with it. It has done nothing better than symfony, codeigniter, Zendframework. I feel it breeds bad coding habbits, many coders like it simplicity but when they use it they implement many inefficient functions, mostly around querying the database. Laravel has this robust query builder api so you have many novices accessing the database through it without understanding what they are doing. I dont really know what "quality of life" is provided by Laravel. Its just another MVC.
- paulryanrogers 7y ago
  Like Rails it can provide a lot of structure and packages for the routine requirements. It's ORM isn't much better or worse than others I've used. The alternatives remain popular, if less so since Laravel's marketing has kicked in. To each their own.
- jjeaff 7y ago
  Quality of life is better because you can build so much, so quickly with laravel. There is a ton that laravel can bootstrap for you out of the box and then add to that the very large ecosystem of plugins that has come out of the community.

tpaschalis 7y ago

I've worked with Laravel in the past few months. Having never worked with PHP, I went from eew PHP?! to a delightful, fast-paced development model. It shows that good documentation and listening to your user-base will get an Open Source project really far. It just gets even small things right, nice testing support, database migrations, request validations, events and broadcasting, you name it!

mmmuhd 7y ago

We are ever grateful to Taylor otwel and the team for developing and maintaining Laravel, ever wonder why most of us African web developers use Laravel as a web framework? Because it works and fast without much need for fancy tweaks (here a decent internet is still a luxury in most parts of the continent), Laravel allows you to spring up a decent web app fast without much hassle, you can easily set it up in the cloud and it will be up and running with need for maintenance and site reliability issues. More grease to your elbows Taylor and the rest of the Laravel team.

kugelblitz 7y ago

I've stopped using since Laravel 5.4, switched to Symfony 2.8 up to now (5.0) and recently also Flask or Django (at least for back end). My biggest pains were the facades and also I wasn't a big fan of the Active Records (with the empty classes and only doing autocomplete by regularly generating loads of annotations). Being a freelancer and the increasing popularity, I suppose it's worth taking a look again. Though I'm still a bit hesitant to use it for my own long-term projects, especially since there are so many breaking changes and there are some side projects I won't be able to update for 3 to 12 months while I work freelance or build up new projects. Can anyone share their experience using + updating a Laravel-based website which is at least 2 years old, especially regarding maintainability?

dzonga 7y ago
you get a lot of freelancing opportunities using flask ?
- kugelblitz 7y ago
  No, not really. It was my entry point into Python, now I use Django mostly. PHP opportunities are much more. I like using Symfony, though I also get Laravel or E-Commerce (e.g. Shopware, Spryker) offers. But of course this is because my profile is PHP / JS, so I get these offers. Though Node.js as back end is noticeably increasing.
justanotherc 7y ago
I was turned off of Laravel from a bad experience of the very reason you're afraid of it. Back in 2017 I was hired to take over a large Laravel 4.2 project, which included upgrading it to 5.0+ version. The upgrade was a very long, extremely painful experience, and Laravel itself progressed from 5.0 to 5.2 during our upgrade so it was like trying to hit a moving target. I know there is a lot of capability wrapped up in the framework which enables rapid development, but for long lived applications, you're going to spend a not-insignificant amount of your time keeping up with upgrades. So in a sense, the framework itself becomes technical debt. That makes it a bad framework from my point of view. Your code base should not be forced to be so tightly coupled to the framework that you have to spend time updating it to keep up with the framework versions (or get stuck on an old version).

thinkindie 7y ago

two things I noticed: 1) the great majority of features were authored or contributed by Taylor Otwell - in any cases he was the only name next to each feature. How this is sustainable in the long term? 2) it is still using a lot of singletone/static methods and so on, how they can promote some solid testing culture?

samspenc 7y ago

As a long-time PHP developer, I love Laravel, all of its features, and how the community has built around it, but there are a couple of pain points I felt when I used it last year, not sure if these have improved: 1. Very difficult to get running in shared hosting. 2. Feels a bit heavyweight for a SPA (Single Page Application) where the Javascript front-end framework (e.g. Angular, React) is doing most of the work, and the PHP Laravel backend is just processing the CRUD APIs in REST.

dbbk 7y ago
For the SPA case they have a slimmed down version called Lumen.

npv789 7y ago

kudos for Taylor Otwell