How is this better than rails?
It feels like Rails developers are just absent from all these online discussions because they're too busy living happy, fulfilling lives.
Every time I have to work with another technology, I end up wishing it could be done like Rails.
Rails's drawback is that with enough before/after filters it feels like logic is hard to grasp, but it still turns out to be better than any alternative I could of. The laravel middleware approach is much more cumbersome and less powerful.