Why did we choose Laravel php framework?

A bit of history.

It was in 2014. The number and complexity of our projects grew and our old self-written CMS no longer allowed us to cope with the flow and level of sites needed by our customers.

We recruited new programmers in the team, for a while it solved the problems, but globally no, I do not think that we would be trusted to develop our sites: http://www.president.gov.ua/, http://atl.ua/, https://credit-agricole.ua/, http://mafia.ua/ and others, if we had an old system.

We needed a new CMS based on the modern PHP framework!

What tasks should the framework solve?

• Easy to learn. It was necessary that each developer could for the minimum spent  the amount of time to master the framework and write quality code.
• Easy to write code. The code should be intuitive and simple, so that any developer can support the project.
• Speed of work. We understood that on the framework the download speed of the pages of the sites will be lower than on the old CMS, where only pure PHP, but it should be within 0.2 - 0.3 seconds. No one likes to wait long.
• Code writing speed. There are a lot of projects and terms are always for yesterday, so fast development of sites is necessary.
• Security. Among our clients there are many banks, and for them security is most important.
• Scalability. To easily be able to write, as not large corporate sites, and large online stores and portals.
• Functionality. From the box, solutions of many typical tasks must be available.

Choosing between frameworks

The choice was between the frameworks: Laravel, Yii, Symfony. Not before the framework as Codeigniter and Kohana immediately disappeared, it is difficult to call them generally frameworks. 

The dinosaur, like Zend, was also thrown away immediately. It is written only by those who started on it to write a project 15 years ago and can not now jump off it.

Why not Symfony and Yii?

Symfony is still designed for large projects, small and medium projects on it, it's like digging out a potato :). It is possible, but not very convenient, but we needed a framework for all cases.

Yii is a good framework and developers who have enough experience with it will say that it is better than Laravel. The same thing only in the opposite direction will tell "laravelschiki".

But at that time we had no experience in either Yii or Laravel, so opening the documentation for Laravel and Yii, and having spent a day studying it, we realized that the philosophy of Laravel is closer to us. Cut from the documentation.

«Laravel – framework for building web applications with expressive and elegant syntax. We believe that the development process is only the most productive when the work with the framework brings joy and pleasure. Happy developers write the best code.»

Why is Laravel?

Starting in 2013, Laravel is recognized as the best and most popular framing in the world. 

• Syntax is easier and more elegant than competitors.
• Taylor Otwell (creator Laravel), God bless him for his development, took the best of existing PHP frameworks, as well as Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET MVC, Sinatra and created a framework that solves the routine tasks of programmers as simply as possible.
•  Laravel – this is a full stack solution for both back-end and front-end developers. For the frontend there is from the box the build system laravel Mix, which is built on Webpack, as well as the js framework – Vue.
• Packages (extensions), which enabled us to create packages for our needs. Now we have about 15 packages that solve typical problems. The same CMS we have in the form of a package, which you can update with one command in case of new updates. There are also hundreds, maybe thousands, & nbsp; ready packs of developers around the world, so we no longer need to reinvent the wheel every time an unusual task comes along. With a high degree of probability, the package has already been written by someone.
• The presence of an integrated system of unit testing phpunit,   that makes our sites more reliable.
• Excellent documentation, as well as https://laracasts.com/ an excellent site for learning, will be useful both for beginners and advanced programmers.
• Security. The ability to gain unauthorized access to the database is extremely difficult. A high level of security guarantees reliable protection against SQL- injection, attacks such as XSS, CSRF.
• Always in a trend. It uses the latest features of PHP (closures, namespaces, etc.), which guarantees better performance. In version 5.5 the default is PHP7.
• Eloquent ORM. Very simple and functional ORM based on the ActiveRecord pattern.
• Great community. The solution to any problem can be easily found in Google.

The article was prepared by the PHP developer of the digital agency VIS-A-VIS – Arthur Shchablevsky.