Another great PHP feature is that PHP is the framework, you don't really need any heavy 3rd party frameworks on top of it. Getting familiar with a couple of libraries to cover what's missing is usually enough for everything web development.
Agree you don't need a 3rd party framework on top of it, but Laravel has been a joy to use (though to be fair, I'm a big rails and phoenix fan, so I've been infected by prior art).
Laravel is great for when you know you're gonna onboard/offboard a bunch of developers over months/years, and you want them to feel right at home as fast as possible.
For more long-term business, I'd always recommend go "chosen libraries put together well" over "framework everyone knows", as the developer churn will be lower, and having more control over your design and architecture tends to be more important (and applicable) when people stick around for longer.
As a solo dev, I’ve found myself spinning up little servers for various things and then just letting them run for months between needing to make changes.
At first (and for admittedly way too long), I used this as a way to try out fun new frameworks - Node+Express for one thing, Phoenix for another, SvelteKit for a third.
I noticed it was a huge pain to dive into these things once every 6 months. I’d forgotten how it worked, and for some of them at least, I could look up docs and examples.
My Node+Express thing was the worst because it was all homegrown. There’s very little convention in that world, and you have to make your own. No docs were coming to save me, and this was in the Before Times, like 3 years ago pre-LLM.
Anyway I ported everything to Rails and it’s wonderful. I know how it works, there’s almost 30 years of examples online and they even mostly still work, and LLMs are great at it too.
Lots of power in a good framework, in a situation that’s a good fit for it!
Symfony kind of fits the “well-chosen libraries” approach as each of its components can be pulled in individually with no bearing on the architecture of your application.
PHP remains one of the fastest ways of getting a web application done - especially with frameworks like Yii2, Laravel etc.
One of the best features of PHP is that you don't have to learn and unlearn new tech stacks every few years.
Another great PHP feature is that PHP is the framework, you don't really need any heavy 3rd party frameworks on top of it. Getting familiar with a couple of libraries to cover what's missing is usually enough for everything web development.
Agree you don't need a 3rd party framework on top of it, but Laravel has been a joy to use (though to be fair, I'm a big rails and phoenix fan, so I've been infected by prior art).
Laravel is great for when you know you're gonna onboard/offboard a bunch of developers over months/years, and you want them to feel right at home as fast as possible.
For more long-term business, I'd always recommend go "chosen libraries put together well" over "framework everyone knows", as the developer churn will be lower, and having more control over your design and architecture tends to be more important (and applicable) when people stick around for longer.
As a solo dev, I’ve found myself spinning up little servers for various things and then just letting them run for months between needing to make changes.
At first (and for admittedly way too long), I used this as a way to try out fun new frameworks - Node+Express for one thing, Phoenix for another, SvelteKit for a third.
I noticed it was a huge pain to dive into these things once every 6 months. I’d forgotten how it worked, and for some of them at least, I could look up docs and examples.
My Node+Express thing was the worst because it was all homegrown. There’s very little convention in that world, and you have to make your own. No docs were coming to save me, and this was in the Before Times, like 3 years ago pre-LLM.
Anyway I ported everything to Rails and it’s wonderful. I know how it works, there’s almost 30 years of examples online and they even mostly still work, and LLMs are great at it too.
Lots of power in a good framework, in a situation that’s a good fit for it!
Symfony scales better than Laravel when you need to go big over the long term. This has been my experience anyway.
I realize Laravel is built on Symfony but using Symfony directly is a different experience
Symfony kind of fits the “well-chosen libraries” approach as each of its components can be pulled in individually with no bearing on the architecture of your application.
It’s been quite a few years since I last did PHP, but I wrote my own wedding invite management tool using Laravel and PHP 8.5
Herd is super neat, reminds me of XAMPP back in the day. FrankenPHP is everything I wanted out of a modern PHP web server.
And the language? Basically the same as I left it, with some nice things added. I kind of miss it :)
does that remain true when LLM's can generate almost any language?
tech stacks -> frameworks