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I'm one of those web devs that tries everything under the sun, and I also happen to have worked for a lot of companies (more than a dozen already, I'm on my 40s
by midrus 5y ago
I'm one of those web devs that tries everything under the sun, and I also happen to have worked for a lot of companies (more than a dozen already, I'm on my 40s).
Laravel is such a *joy*. I've never had this feeling of using something so easy and productive. I've been recently building a side project with LiveWire and oh-my-god. I really wish I had discovered it before. From the templating system (you get components out of the box! no more "includes" if you don't want to) to the validations, to the queues system... everything is so well integrated and so easy to use.
For the last decade I've worked mostly with Django and SPAs, I'm not going back to that any time soon. Django templates are extremely limited for nowadays requirements, and SPAs are 1000x more complex to build and maintain so in my opinion they're not worth the price/effort. I think Livewire, Hotwire, Unpoly, Htmx, etc are what 90% of web apps need.
- psychoslave 5y agoDid also plaid with Ruby on Rails, or even Sinatra, and how would your rank the dev XP compared to Laravel?
- midrus 5y agoI did use Rails for several months while helping a friend with his business/sideproject/startup kick-off and despite I really liked it, I much prefer Laravel + Livewire and PHP (https://tallstack.dev/ https://tallstack.dev/) over Rails + Hotwire + Ruby, but it's up to personal preferences: - I prefer things to be more explicit than implicit and lean more towards configuration over convention. - I lean more towards having types/typing information than not having it - PHP is way, way, way more used than Ruby - Performance (just talking about development environment performance) is a lot better in PHP (no server restarts, etc) - Availability of third party libraries is a lot stronger on the PHP side, probably due to it being more popular - Tooling and editor support. This is a big one for me, and I've found out things to work a lot better with VSCode for PHP than for Ruby. Probably related to it being both, more popular and more explicit. - Overall, Laravel feels even more complete than Rails and just fits better my brain. But, I think Rails is still great, and I would use it over building a microservices mesh of Go servers on kubernetes with React frontends, etc, etc.
- cutler 5y agoI'll take Rails over Laravel any day. Verbose, doc-block-riddled, pseudo-Java PHP is the polar opposite of elegant, composable Ruby.
- midrus 5y agoWell, probably you are right, but for me ecosystem, libraries, tooling, editor support, performance, etc is far more important than language syntax. But we all have our preferences and that's ok.
- gjsman-1000 5y agoLaravel and Livewire is the best-kept secret ever because everybody is too busy being biased against PHP.
- manigandham 5y agoPhp/Laravel/Livewire == Elixir/Phoenix/LiveView == C#/.NET/Blazor == Ruby/Rails/Hotwire/Turbo It's also slowly being integrated into JS frameworks although they're still behind as the focus has been clientside and static generation so far.
- raihansaputra 5y ago== Everything else/HTMX. Well currently HTMX is still a "low level" clientside library, but in a similar vein to Ruby/Rails/Hotwire/Turbo. Feels like BE-first dev and non-SPA/JS centric client webdev is slowly regaining ground. Exciting.
- midrus 5y agoI've found Unpoly to be a nice middleground between those framework specific solutions and htmx
- sodapopcan 5y agoOr we're too busy using Phoenix LiveView ;P
- cutler 5y agoOr Rails/Hotwire.
- midrus 5y agoOne of the companies I worked for used Elixir/Phoenix. It is an extremely cool piece of tech but it is nowhere near as productive as Laravel, Rails, etc. Missing libraries, difficult to hire for, bad editor support, and overall feels very niche which such a small community. That company eventually moved out of it.