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A lot of people here have mentioned Laravel. I think one of the key things about Laravel is that the creator, Taylor Otwell, is only focused on Laravel. Imagine

A lot of people here have mentioned Laravel. I think one of the key things about Laravel is that the creator, Taylor Otwell, is only focused on Laravel. Imagine if DHH didn't ever have Basecamp (or 37 Signals) and only focused on Rails and the Rails ecosystem. The Laravel team now has several full time employees working on making the entire Laravel experience as painless as it can be. Of course Taylor and the Laravel team have paid products, but they are all 100% focused on the Laravel ecosystem and developer experience! Some of the things that the Laravel ecosystem has as first party packages / services: Paid: • Vapor - Serverless Platform. Run your vanilla Laravel apps on Lambda. • Forge - Server Management. Builds Laravel ready servers on any cloud. • Envoyer - Zero Downtime Deployment. Deploy your apps with push-to-deploy. • Nova - Administration Panel. Completely code-driven admin panels. • Spark - SaaS App Scaffolding. Basically a SaaS starter kit. Free: • Horizon - Queue Monitoring. Like Sidekiq • Jetstream - App Scaffolding. SaaS starter kit with teams, invitations, api, etc. • Echo - Realtime Events. Think Pusher, Socket.io, etc. • Sail - Local Docker environment. • Valet - Dev Environment for Macs. • Mix - Webpack Asset Compilation. A sane wrapper around webpack. • Cashier - Subscription Billing Integration. Stripe + Paddle. • Dusk - Browser Testing and Automation. First party browser automation for tests. • Sanctum - API / Mobile Authentication. • Laravel Scout - Full-Text Search. Wrapper around Algolia, Melisearch, or full-text database searching • Socialite - OAuth Authentication. Log in with GitHub, Google, etc. Dozens of community packages as well. • Telescope - Debug Assistant. That's all first party. It's unbelievable to me how many batteries are included. Then you start looking at the surrounding ecosystem beyond that and it gets even crazier. Laravel as a community is an extremely welcoming place, and I have found that most people care deeply about their code and architecture, but don't pick each other to death on details that don't matter. I think all in all it's a pretty pragmatic group. If you haven't checked out PHP lately because you think we're writing a file-per-page and FTPing them up somewhere, you should give Laravel a look.

jgilias 5y ago
Yeah, curiously, I think Laravel is just getting started in a way. Taylor seems to have a superb vision about what it is that he wants to achieve with it and in what way, and I don't think the 'rest of us' have fully grasped the 'end-game', and what the implications will be. I mean, he took the most popular, but somewhat 'not cool anymore' backend programming language with a huge pool of developers, and proceeded to build _the_ way to build server applications with it. If that's not strategic brilliance, I don't know what is. EDIT: For context. My exposure to Laravel is jumping into some projects and becoming productive in a day without prior exposure to PHP. Largely due to superb documentation and the batteries included approach.
- aarondf 5y ago
  > Yeah, curiously, I think Laravel is just getting started in a way. That would be amazing. I agree, I think Taylor has good vision. His overriding principle seems to be "make people's lives easier," which makes for a pretty good ecosystem.
lowercased 5y ago
What somewhat more interesting is the marketplaces surrounding some of these. There's a marketplace of nova add-ons, some free, some paid. Some of these are definitely given more love than others, of course. I'd probably pay for some extended 'dusk' package to provide a better experience overall, but... unsure there's enough of a market to justify that? I recently learned that the 'envoy' stuff is already free in Laravel - envoyer seems to be a hosted SaaS built with it, but you can define your own 'envoy' stuff to run however you want. https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/envoy https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/envoy
JackWritesCode 5y ago
Love it, Aaron. I've always felt more confident using Laravel knowing that it's backed by a competent entrepreneur. These paid services ensure the longevity of Laravel. We've paid for Spark and Nova, and we have Vapor & Forge subscriptions.
weatherlite 5y ago
Rails has people who do it full time as well, AFAIK Shopify workers like Rafael Faranca and I'm sure there are quite a few others. Besides them Rails has an army of volunteer committers, its one of the bigger open source framework communities, and the commit distribution is much healthier than Laravel's: Laravel looks like a one man show compared to Rails. As for all these packages - Ruby has equivalents. It's hard to say what should come included in the framework and how opinionated Rails should be - many people think its already too opinionated.

jgilias 5y ago

Yeah, curiously, I think Laravel is just getting started in a way. Taylor seems to have a superb vision about what it is that he wants to achieve with it and in what way, and I don't think the 'rest of us' have fully grasped the 'end-game', and what the implications will be. I mean, he took the most popular, but somewhat 'not cool anymore' backend programming language with a huge pool of developers, and proceeded to build _the_ way to build server applications with it. If that's not strategic brilliance, I don't know what is. EDIT: For context. My exposure to Laravel is jumping into some projects and becoming productive in a day without prior exposure to PHP. Largely due to superb documentation and the batteries included approach.

aarondf 5y ago
> Yeah, curiously, I think Laravel is just getting started in a way. That would be amazing. I agree, I think Taylor has good vision. His overriding principle seems to be "make people's lives easier," which makes for a pretty good ecosystem.

lowercased 5y ago

What somewhat more interesting is the marketplaces surrounding some of these. There's a marketplace of nova add-ons, some free, some paid. Some of these are definitely given more love than others, of course. I'd probably pay for some extended 'dusk' package to provide a better experience overall, but... unsure there's enough of a market to justify that? I recently learned that the 'envoy' stuff is already free in Laravel - envoyer seems to be a hosted SaaS built with it, but you can define your own 'envoy' stuff to run however you want. https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/envoy https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/envoy

JackWritesCode 5y ago

Love it, Aaron. I've always felt more confident using Laravel knowing that it's backed by a competent entrepreneur. These paid services ensure the longevity of Laravel. We've paid for Spark and Nova, and we have Vapor & Forge subscriptions.

weatherlite 5y ago

Rails has people who do it full time as well, AFAIK Shopify workers like Rafael Faranca and I'm sure there are quite a few others. Besides them Rails has an army of volunteer committers, its one of the bigger open source framework communities, and the commit distribution is much healthier than Laravel's: Laravel looks like a one man show compared to Rails. As for all these packages - Ruby has equivalents. It's hard to say what should come included in the framework and how opinionated Rails should be - many people think its already too opinionated.