I used to like Laravel, but lately it feels so enterprisy. There is a lot of boilerplate in Laravel today and it was changing too fast for me to keep up with it.
The thing that kept me away from it for actual enterprise use was the fact the project is run by a single person. Where would it be without Taylor? Django and others have actual foundations that will keep it going for the long-term, more mindshare and more committers as part of the core project team.
The flip side of that question, though, is "where would Laravel be if it were built by committee rather than benevolent dictator?" I'd wager Taylor's "I'm doing shit my way" has been at least part of what has made Laravel so successful.
In my most recent (side) project, I'm doing a Yii2 website and I'm feeling like it's not enterprisey enough. I have to go out of my way to figure out the best way to split things apart (which, I guess is good because it doesn't actually make that difficult for me at all - it's just something I have to choose to do)
I used Yii2 at a previous job. The way that it splits things out feels horrendous. The documentation is sub-par, and I feel like I spent more time trying to figure out why something didn't work the way I expected (from reading the code) than I did fixing things.
I'm sure at least some part of that was the previous developer who built the application. But there is absolutely no reason for documentation to not answer the basic questions that seem to come up many times per day in their IRC channel.
I commonly recommend Yii and laud it's extensive documentation and "Definitive Guide" that covers basically everything.
In my current experience as a developer, Yii's documentation is the best I've ever utilized. Much better than any Javadoc I've googled or even php.net's
What are forms and form validation like in Yii? [Have looked at the docs, but after real-world usage]
I've used form libraries from the PHPClasses one back in 2003 through Symfony forms now (which has cognitive overload, and is so flexible as to be restrictive). Most business systems I write are data focused so forms play a massive role in them - and in my developer happiness.
Validation works directly with the model and you can pick a number of ways to check the input and have it return an appropriate error message.
The view/controller layers are very flexible and can be hooked up to anything from an HTML template using Yii to angular/bootstrap (which is what we're using) or another framework to handle the forms.
Use it at my current job. Also used li3 before that. The current version works pretty well without having any of the weirdness that can plague a framework once it gets more mature and people start wanting to graft in whatever is trendy from other projects.
What I like about it is the flexibility of the ORM, where you can use the model in a sane way but can completely toss it aside and just use SQL for those edge cases that would be a PITA in something like Django.
I like Laravel Elixir (the npm package) and Eloquent (the ORM). Laravel itself is overly complex and the learning curve keeps getting higher. I'm much happier with Slim 3
I think with the composer package manager mixing and matching components fais what makes modern PHP so effective. I'm using the mini-framework Silex and a bunch of components I find useful (twig, phpexcel ).
> I used to like Laravel, but lately it feels so enterprisy.
You think that feels enterprisy? Try Symfony, and listen to the community, with its "way to do things" that change every 6 months depending what's in vogue - and each time are invariably more abstract and complicated.
I have no idea since I don't use Laravel or PHP anymore, but I tried it a couple of months ago and it seemed completey different from a year ago or more.
