Chapter 6 - Why programmers like Laravel

Let’s cut to the chase … why would you, as a programmer, want to use Laravel as a framework?

Let me talk a bit about Framework Envy.

(Here I picture talking to a therapist. Him nodding sagely, taking a drag on his pipe and saying, “Talk about zee framework envy.”)

I’d been given projects written in PHP. These were bloated, PHP 4 projects written by a developer whose only concept of “class” was that it is something at school to be skipped. And I’d look across the street at the Ruby developers and silently wish for some natural disaster–earthquake, tornado, even lightning–to level their building.

Does this make me a bad person?

This was at a time when Ruby was all shiny and new. What made Ruby cool wasn’t the language itself (although there are very nice aspects to the language). No, what made Ruby cool was Ruby on Rails.

All the developers were flocking to Ruby on Rails.

Why were they flocking to it?

Because it promised a way of development that was fun. And by fun, I mean powerful, expressive, and quick to implement. I credit RoR on creating an atmosphere making programming a delight again. The coding joy instilled by RoR is the exact same feeling as that initial impetus that made us all want to be programmers.

How sad was it that we were mired in the PHP world? Where any Tom, Dick or Henrietta was a “PHP Programmer” because they could hack a Wordpress install.

(See the next chapter about Wordpress - The Good, The Bad, The Ugly)

But, no, we were stuck with the requirements that our projects be in PHP. We couldn’t be a cool kid like all those Ruby developers. They were cutting edge. They were the ones pushing the boundaries, making a name for themselves.

Along comes Laravel. It takes the best of Ruby on Rails and brings it to the PHP world. Suddenly, a PHP developer is dealing with routes to controllers instead of individual scripts. Concepts like DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) now have more meaning. Suddenly, we have a “blade” template engine incorporating the essence of PHP in a way Smarty Templates only dreamed of. We have, quite literally, the potential of PHP Nirvana.

Does it sound like I think Laravel’s awesome? I hope so.