Laravel is one of those legendary frameworks that everyone using it loves.

To me, it’s in the same level of Rails and Django.

If you know/prefer Ruby you use Rails.

If you know/prefer Python you use Django.

If you know/prefer PHP you use Laravel.

Generally speaking I mean, because each of those languages has a ton of alternatives.

I would say Laravel, together with WordPress, is the “PHP killer app”.

PHP is often disregarded by developers, but it has some unique features that make it a great language for Web Development and Laravel figured out how to take advantage of the best features of PHP.

On Twitter I can only see love for Laravel.

Much like how it happens for Rails.

This is not a “new framework of the month” kind of thing. Laravel has been around since 2011, well before modern frontend tools like React and Vue.js existed.

It stood the test of time. And it evolved over the years to a serious and complete solution for building Web Applications, which comes out of the box complete with everything you need.

Something like Laravel does not exist in pure JavaScript tooling.

Things like Next.js or Remix appear very primitive in some aspects, while in some other aspects they seem more modern.

It’s just a different tool.

And I think as Web Developers we must know in which scenario one tool is more optimal than others. So we can make the best technical choice depending on the requirements.

I am going to give a introduction to Laravel to get you up and running.

Lessons in this unit: