Laravel First Impressions From A JavaScript Dev

It's been a long time coming, and I finally gave Laravel a look. It didn't disappoint!

[dylanelens]

Laraval is a really mature framework. It is also crazy stable. But the best feature has to be their documentation. It is probably the best documentation I have ever read.

[avid]

What people don't realize is the power of its execution model. The entire web community reinvents the entire wheel to come to where PHP actually began.

React mixes HTML and JS, PHP did that from the get go.

Serverless with shared nothing architecture? Well, Every PHP request is shared nothing, it goes even to the extent of not reusing framework objects. It's like it was built from day 1 for AWS lambda.

Cold start too slow with your backend? PHP does cold start for every request, parses and executes at the same speed as a hot loaded app.

Don't want to update your libraries every two weeks? With PHP, you can upgrade languages, frameworks and PHP versions everyday and the code is rewritten for you using PHP rector. But generally the libraries in PHP are very mature so it is rare to see breaking changes when compared to JS.

Hot reloading? PHP had that since 2000s (it doesn't have HMR but most HMRs are useless after a certain point of complexity)

It made a lot of mistakes at the language level and is constantly improving it at a fast pace, but it has got the architecture right from day 1 because it was built to solve the problem of web development and is not a language looking for a problem to solve.

For the people hating on PHP, people in the PHP community are nice folks, they put their heads down, work on their projects, build their business, make good money and go home. For them, it is just another well sharpened tool that does exactly what it was built for, so they likely won't fight back nor come back at you with memes. Use PHP If you want to build a business and do it quick, if you want to have fun, we have other hundreds of languages to choose from.

[gE]

As a Laravel developer I find really entertaining seeing someone going through the first steps, as I wanted you to like it :D

[xshashwat]

13:45
{{ __('Dashboard') }} was for multi-lingual support. Laravel has a built in helper function ` __() ` that helps with multi-lingual functionality. And the curly braces are blade templating syntax {{ }}. So in this scenario if the user uses a different language than English the "Dashboard" text will change to that language given that it is defined in that language. The lang directory handles all the language translations files.

[sentgine]

There is an existing hot reload for Laravel in development mode.

1) Open up a new terminal and run 'php artisan serve.'

2) Open another terminal and run "npm run dev"

Provided that you installed either Jetstream or Breeze, the hot reload comes out of the box.

[WebDevCody]

It’s not that writing JavaScript without a meta framework is scary, it’s a pain. When you’ve written thing.addEventListener 10 times in a file, you start to wonder why you didn’t just use react to begin with.

[hynekss]

I came here to say Lavavel is a collective work and not only Taylor's, but then I looked at the contributions graph and I was like, "Hey, the man well deserved his Lambo!"

[TonyMessias]

Nice! You might already know this by now, but you can get live-reloading by running `npm run dev` instead of `npm run build`. That comes with the Vite setup in Larave.

[nullzeon]

I didn't even notice the 20 mins pass by, I need more!

[sk_jay]

I can't wait for him to realize he can create almost all the boiler templates such as Models Controllers, Factories, Seeders, Resources etc which just an artisan command and the other goodies that Laravel comes with

[joshrtorres]

Also to answer your Inertia question, it basically just allows you to do Routing on the backend with PHP instead of with your frontend framework.

[donaldpakkies]

Laravel makes you feel like you’re a magician. Absolutely love it!

[bgallaghr]

Would definitely like to see a more in-depth go at Laravel from your perspective. I've used Laravel from the beginning and can't speak highly enough about it. It's a shame that developers can be so divisive about what stack they use, but honestly if you just dive in you find Laravel has taken the best aspects of application development and made building apps fun and exciting.

[hexdom]

I love Laravel and have been using it for years! It's a stable and battle tested framework with a LOT of stuff out of the box, and the stuff they have included are well thought out and implemented in a away so it makes it easy to work with. The framework is using the MVC model (Model (database table representation), View and Controller (business logic, CRUD = Create, Read, Update, Delete, etc).

It's a GREAT framework.

The {{ __('Word') }} is for localization purposes.

Edit: {{}} are Laravel's standard syntax for bringing out variables from the controller. The __() is the localization part. Just for clarity.

Makes it easy to translate using simple translation files.

[brunoggdev]

it's surprisingly good to hear you talk and discover your way through php and laravel (this is my first video), you don't go unconfortably too crazy on stuff, you sound mature, chill and fun. What an enjoyable experience, keep it up!

[Refresh]

Laravel put out a NextJS starter project and it's an absolute dream. Pair that with Laravel Octane for the backend and you have a modern framework that competes with basically anything (like ~8ms response times)

[cassolmedia]

Welcome to the php/laravel community! We're glad to have you!

[nerminkarapandzic]

I'm happy to see new people looking at laravl, for what it is it's been looked over far too much. Laravel is amazing, and I also remember just enjoying my life back when I was working with Laravel.

[jameskh]

Regarding the one man band comment - it’s not just Taylor who works on Laravel now, there’s a pretty amazing core team. Loved the video, been waiting for this 😅 Glad Laravel is starting to get the recognition it deserves!

[pietrosanchez]

Been using Laravel for years now. It has fantastic documentation and ecosystem indeed. I just have a love/hate relationship with one of its core concepts which is the facade (not much relation w/ facade pattern). It does a lot of magic through this "facade" and as you learn more about web development, you will prefer visibility over abstraction. It's specially difficult for beginners to find what those magical string arguments are (like "auth:sanctum") and how to modify them. As with any abstraction there's a price to pay when said abstraction can't accommodate your specific implementation needs.