How to Laravel series: How I met my Laravel

Intro

If you already know me from Twitter, then you probably have noticed that I am a big fan of the PHP framework Laravel by Taylor Otwell.
I wanted to learn Ruby a year ago because I wasn’t satisfied with PHP anymore and thought it was time to check out a new language. After two weeks of fun, while diving into Ruby and Ruby on Rails, I started a new job, and I had to deal with PHP again =) Some friends told me to look at Laravel, which I did. I immediately fall in love with this fantastic framework; it has been my PHP framework of choice since then.

Why Laravel

There are many ORM solutions out there, but none as Eloquent as… well Eloquent (Dayle Rees)

There are so many reasons that I could fill the whole article with information about that. Additionally, I don’t want to write the same stuff here that you will find in so many other articles out there about Laravel. But to be safe, I will mention some main features. Migration - An excellent version control system for your database schema, as you might know from Ruby on Rails. I wouldn’t want to work without such a system anymore. Composer - Laravel is using Composer, a PHP dependency manager, to install and update its dependencies. Besides, it used to include third-party packages in your application. As a result, it has never been easier to manage your code. Artisan - This is the name of the Laravel command-line interface, which provides dozens of commands for your daily application work. This is one of my favorite features because it makes working with Laravel super fast. Eloquent - This is the ORM solution that lets you interact with your database through PHP objects. This is damn powerful and easy to use. Testing - Laravel is built with testing in mind, and testing with PHPUnit is already included. How cool is that, right? And there is a lot more!

Resources

There are also a bunch of great Laravel resources I would like to share.

• Official Laravel website
• Laravel.io - Laravel knowledge base
• Laracasts - Laravel Screencasts by Jeffrey Way
• Larasnippets - Laravel snippets collected by John Kevin Basco
• Nettus+ - Great web development blog with lots of Laravel articles
• Liechtenecker.at - An article I wrote about Laravel in German.
• Laravel Tricks - Sharing ways of using Laravel

Feedback

I will write about my experiences with Laravel at work or through private projects. Let me know if you want me to write about a specific topic. I also love to hear about your experiences, so feel free to drop some lines in the comments or on Twitter.

Have fun

So that’s it for the intro to my brand new Laravel series. Stay tuned to find more articles soon.