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Comment by staticelf | Hacker News Reader

I used to like Laravel, but lately it feels so enterprisy. There is a lot of boilerplate in Laravel today and it was changing too fast for me to keep up with it.

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The thing that kept me away from it for actual enterprise use was the fact the project is run by a single person. Where would it be without Taylor? Django and others have actual foundations that will keep it going for the long-term, more mindshare and more committers as part of the core project team.

> Where would it be without Taylor?

The flip side of that question, though, is "where would Laravel be if it were built by committee rather than benevolent dictator?" I'd wager Taylor's "I'm doing shit my way" has been at least part of what has made Laravel so successful.

Have you tried Yii at all?

In my most recent (side) project, I'm doing a Yii2 website and I'm feeling like it's not enterprisey enough. I have to go out of my way to figure out the best way to split things apart (which, I guess is good because it doesn't actually make that difficult for me at all - it's just something I have to choose to do)

I used Yii2 at a previous job. The way that it splits things out feels horrendous. The documentation is sub-par, and I feel like I spent more time trying to figure out why something didn't work the way I expected (from reading the code) than I did fixing things.

I'm sure at least some part of that was the previous developer who built the application. But there is absolutely no reason for documentation to not answer the basic questions that seem to come up many times per day in their IRC channel.

My experience has been 100% different from yours.

I commonly recommend Yii and laud it's extensive documentation and "Definitive Guide" that covers basically everything.

In my current experience as a developer, Yii's documentation is the best I've ever utilized. Much better than any Javadoc I've googled or even php.net's

What are forms and form validation like in Yii? [Have looked at the docs, but after real-world usage]

I've used form libraries from the PHPClasses one back in 2003 through Symfony forms now (which has cognitive overload, and is so flexible as to be restrictive). Most business systems I write are data focused so forms play a massive role in them - and in my developer happiness.

Validation works directly with the model and you can pick a number of ways to check the input and have it return an appropriate error message.

The view/controller layers are very flexible and can be hooked up to anything from an HTML template using Yii to angular/bootstrap (which is what we're using) or another framework to handle the forms.

Use it at my current job. Also used li3 before that. The current version works pretty well without having any of the weirdness that can plague a framework once it gets more mature and people start wanting to graft in whatever is trendy from other projects.

What I like about it is the flexibility of the ORM, where you can use the model in a sane way but can completely toss it aside and just use SQL for those edge cases that would be a PITA in something like Django.

+1 for Yii2, I've used it for many big projects, it's rock solid and faster than most libraries of a similar size.

No I haven't and I probably won't, since I don't do php anymore :)

The more I used Laravel the less I liked it.

I like Laravel Elixir (the npm package) and Eloquent (the ORM). Laravel itself is overly complex and the learning curve keeps getting higher. I'm much happier with Slim 3

That's what I do as well. I mix and match components such as eloquent, guzzle, pux router, twig and stay away from monolithic frameworks.

I think with the composer package manager mixing and matching components fais what makes modern PHP so effective. I'm using the mini-framework Silex and a bunch of components I find useful (twig, phpexcel ).

It works pretty well.

Used to love Laravel, until I learned the hard way it is utterly impossible to debug when shit do hit the fan.

Some related discussion here: https://laracasts.com/index.php/discuss/channels/general-dis...

I'd love to hear an example of "utterly impossible to debug." I've debugged many a Laravel application, during production outages and otherwise.

check the link for examples. for example, a typo in a variable name in a view gives fully unrelated stack traces.

> I used to like Laravel, but lately it feels so enterprisy.

You think that feels enterprisy? Try Symfony, and listen to the community, with its "way to do things" that change every 6 months depending what's in vogue - and each time are invariably more abstract and complicated.

Honest question, didn't they switch to focus on enterprise and slower release schedule? Wouldn't that be easier to keep up with?

I have no idea since I don't use Laravel or PHP anymore, but I tried it a couple of months ago and it seemed completey different from a year ago or more.

If I were to build enterprise software in PHP, I'd use Zend Framework. Not sure why it's not as popular.

Probably because if you're using Zend Framework, you might as well go all the way and just use Java Spring.

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