A few months ago, I decided that it was time for me to start experimenting with a PHP framework. I spent quite a bit of time looking (read: scratching head) over many of the options that are available. I weighed my options for a while and finally decided that Laravel was going to be my framework of choice for experimentation. After dabbling in the documentation for a while, and not quite understanding how the pieces of a framework that robust play together, I looked to Laracasts.
Jeffrey Way put together a solid series of videos that take a head first dive into the Laravel framework. The video series gives a great beginner overview of the framework and explains how all of the pieces are put together to develop a rapid and elegant application: for free. After spending quite a bit of time watching and understanding how the components work, suddenly everything became clear. Laravel is a powerful framework that makes crafting web applications easy for anyone. Laravel is awesome.
After working with Laravel for a few weeks, I decided it was time to propose this as a solution to help develop web applications at the workplace. I developed a sample application in a matter of just a few hours to show just how powerful this framework can be. I wrote up a proposal outlining some of the powerful features and sent it along to my boss. After a meeting discussing the framework, he approved the idea and immediately we started building applications using Laravel.
We rewrote an application that took us a few months to write in around two weeks. The application performed just as well as the hand written copy, security was extremely easy and Eloquent made our transactions easier to read and understand. Needless to say, I'm hooked.
After using Laravel for a few months, I'm disappointed that I hadn't discovered it sooner. Frameworks get a bad reputation for being clunky, slow and unneeded. From my experience, they are a great tool to have. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to making the framework so powerful and stable and to Laracasts for dedicating such time and effort to give such a great learning experience.