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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

IMO PHP's Laravel is competitive with Django.

I think Django, Laravel, and Rails are really the only 3 frameworks with the levels of ecosystem and built in functionality that these 3 have (unless there's something in Java-land that I'm not aware of). ASP.NET Core is close, but the ecosystem around it is weaker.

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I reviewed these sort of web frameworks some time ago and went with ASP.NET Core because of the language attached being more to my liking and industrial-strength than Python, PHP or Ruby. I go in assuming every project will be 500KLOC someday, because it can happen. I've seen codebases this large in Python, and it was no bueno. Static typing, forward migration / backwards compatibility take top priority for me.

Laravel was my 2nd choice, the recent adoption of a JIT into the core really adds some desirability to the space. Not to mention HHVM and how much Wordpress is out there.

But then you’re in Microsoft echo system. No bueno.

Would you mind expanding on this?

People with that mentality aren't rational. If MS offers the best product, which they do for an awful lot of tech, especially once you start valuing integration & support, you should use it. It's actually pretty tough to beat, even if there's guys like that who don't believe in using "best of breed". Using "what you know" is usually best from a developer standpoint, but Microsoft has many best-of-breed products, much to his dismay.

Indeed. And PHP has surprsingly good support for typing these days!

I've been giving C#/Asp.Net Core ago since it's been open sourced. I'm loving C# the langauge, but I wish the ecosystem was as rich as the PHP/JS ecosystems.

Php-wise Symfony is easily on par with Laravel and a really well managed project.

Why would it be on par? Laravel is built with Symfony. [1]

[1] https://symfony.com/projects/laravel

Symfony is more like Java Spring, whereas Laravel feels like a port of Django and Rails. Compared to Laravel, it’s easier to use Symfony to build large applications, but it can feel like overkill for smaller CRUD-only applications. It has a steeper learning curve, so Symfony’s developer pool is more skewed to the senior end.

For Java there's Spring, which is like an entire universe in itself.

I’m quite fond of Phoenix and think it compares favorably with Rails and Django (I’ve never used Laravel).

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