A much more comprehensive web framework in the form of Laravel (https://laravel.com/docs/8.x). Ruby (Rails) and Python (Django) also offer this. But Laravel is one of the best designed frameworks I've ever used and is a joy to use. And modern PHP is a pretty nice language too.
Cool! I've always found the weak point of Node is the libraries, they are often poorly supported and don't work well together. What's the ORM that comes with Laravel like, any good?
> What's the ORM that comes with Laravel like, any good?
Yes, it's pretty decent. Very flexible and always allows you to drop down to lower levels when you need to. knex.js is a port of Laravel's query builder from PHP to JS. But Laravel also has an active record style ORM system on top of the query builder.
Nice, I currently use knex.js with Objection which provides the active record like API on top. You still have to write the migrations in knex but to be honest I prefer it that way because it gives you more control so if you ever do need to drop down to lower levels you know the exact structure.
For me, it was the learning material and the community. I'm a CS student and i wanted to learn a tool to simply create web apps and bring some ideas to life. I quickly realized that JavaScript is the future of web development so i jumped into it. I don't believe i'm dumb but learning node.js and express almost made me hate web dev. My degree hadn't prepared me for things like ORMs, authentication etc and every tutorial i stumbled upon didn't help me made sense of how all these things work together. At that time, i thought PHP was a joke until i saw laravel and how popular it got. Then i purchased a laracasts subscription and i was shocked how good it was. It just made me a better developer. I don't know if learning PHP in 2020 was eventually a good decision but i'm learning about things like SOLID and TDD while in Node.js i would be stuck trying to install body-parser just to make the simplest thing in web dev, accept an http request.
