WHY LARAVEL?

We decided to write this article because many persons asked us why we chose Laravel to build the back-end component of the website www.Skilldetector.com. For those of you wondering what Laravel is, we can say it is the most popular PHP framework nowadays. Outside Laravel, there is a multitude of other back-end solutions, like: Symfony/PHP, Ruby on Rails, Django/Python, ASP.NET MVC (C#), Express.js/Node.js, Spring(Play)/Java, etc. The main reason why we chose Laravel is a very simple one: our familiarity with the PHP programming language and the simplicity of using a framework like Laravel. Before continuing, we want to mention that the intention of this article is not to make a comparison between Laravel and other solutions, mentioned above. In order to have such a valid comparison, it is necessary to know all these solutions in detail, and that’s not the case. In our case, the knowledge of PHP and Laravel are superior compared with the other back-end solutions. This aspect was very important in our decision to choose Laravel/PHP. From our point of view, when you are planning to start working on a software product (website, app, platform), the optimal solution is the one you know better.

Laravel was for us a natural decision, not just because it is simple to use, but also because of the vast, mature and vibrant ecosystem around this framework. We are speaking here about tools like Laravel Forge (server management tool), Laracasts (website with tutorials about Laravel and other interesting web development issues), Envoyer (code deployment tool) and libraries like "Socialite", "Cashier" and many more. All these instruments facilitate a lot the process of developing a web application, leading to a high scalability.

Taking into account that PHP 7 was recently launched, in November 2015, and this version offers superior performances compared with the previous one (version 5), as well as a more coherent and uniform syntax, it is easy for us to assume that this programming language has a great future ahead of it. We can assume the same thing about Laravel, which is updated on an almost daily basis, benefiting from an active development and an impressive evolution.

As a conclusion, we kindly recommend Laravel/PHP to any startup who adventures itself in the development of a web application, irrespective of its complexity.