Rediscovering Laravel

Let's address the purple elephant first - this is a safe space after all. PHP is big, old, with a sketchy performance record in its 30 some years of existance! Everyone gets it. Also, this is a shameless plug for both modern PHP and Laravel. Done. What is wicked fresh, however, is the ever powerful PHP framework ecosystem - in particular Laravel 10. After some time apart, I've rediscovered the joys of building web apps with this framework for "web artisans".

If you have the inclination or mandate to build in PHP, there is a sunny, sandy spot on the rocky dev beach where you may actually recall the joys of tinkering with controllers while having drinks next to beautiful database models. Laravel is one of these places. Hell, there is even a REPL called Tinker! The Artisan command line interface by itself is a feature worthy of diving into Laravel for your next project, as there is little more satisfying in the simulated existence of a developer than running simple build commands to make models, controllers, middleware, scaffold authentication, and run migrations.

The vast Eloquent ORM, facades, and test suite also provide a feature rich environment for a project of any scope - from a micro CMS to a fully loaded e-commerce site. Need quick middleware functionality to get some internationalization rolling? No problem. Notifications? Easy as php artisan make:notification. Maybe you want a stand alone API service for a JavaScript app on another stack? Laravel doesn't care. Spin it up! 

Even if you're still mainlining chaos JS, Laravel has something for you to make your app dreams come true. There's even a solution for client rendered, single page apps, but with a familiar server side flavor: Inertia.js . So for your next project, take a step forward into modern, performant PHP with the backing of a sophisticated, powerful framework.