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Published May 12, 2017 by Bill Keck.
Is Laravel Right For Enterprise Development
In the most recent episode of the Laravel Podcast, they spend some time talking about whether or not Laravel is right for enterprise development.
The question, as I see it, breaks out across handling two main points:
- Scale
- Complexity
We’ll start with the scale issue. In the podcast, Jeffery Way makes the argument that most applications will never scale to the point of running into scalability issues with Laravel.
Let me just say upfront, I’m a huge fan of Jeffery Way and watch Laracasts religiously. At the same time, I disagree with his thinking on scale for the same reason I wouldn’t recommend ignoring n+1 problem simply because there aren’t enough users on the application to create a problem.
In most cases, everyone involved in an enterprise will do everything they can to drive as much traffic to the app as possible, so it’s much better to be ready for it than not.
As I see it, this question is really not about Laravel, but about PHP in general and how you handle state. Personally, I love handling state through sessions, it’s just so easy to work with. By using AWS and Redis, you should be able to handle quite a lot of scale, without having to go to stateless auth. I should also note that Laravel does support stateless auth, though I have never personally used it.
Exactly how much scale you can get to using sessions is beyond my level of experience, but it’s worth noting that Facebook was built with PHP, and they have certainly achieved an amazing level scale. But like I said, I’m not an expert on their architecture, so I’ll just point to a reddit post, and you can check out some opinions about PHP there.
Since PHP 7 was released, it alleviate a lot of the anxiety around using PHP because of the improved speed and performance.
In terms of handling complexity, I know from personal experience that Laravel is a pleasure to work with. Imagine you have an application with over 500 tables, numerous apis, cron jobs, and extremely dynamic frontend requirements that lean heavily on javascript.
Laravel is perfect for that. Laravel has a super-solid architecture that is easy to comprehend and work with. It is so well thought out as a framework that it touches nearly every requirement you are going to come across. And the thing is it doesn’t just provide all of your foundational code, it does it extremely well.
In the Podcast, Taylor Otwell, the author and founder of Laravel, talked about some reasons why someone might not like the framework, including:
- objecting to the marketing of an open source project
- personal dislike of Taylor himself
Let’s deal with the personal dislike of Taylor. I’ve been following Laravel for 4+ years. In that time, I’ve never heard Taylor Otwell make anything resembling an unprofessional statement of any kind. So personal dislike of the founder, which is probably rooted in jealousy, seems like a petty reason not to use a framework.
Business that make decisions based on pettiness tend to not do well in the market.
I also don’t understand why someone would object to a highly successful open source project having a commercial ecosystem around it.
Would you rather not have Laracasts or Envoyer to work with? Honestly, I wouldn’t enjoy programming as much as I do if it weren’t for Jeffery Way and Laracasts. Just think about how much he brings to the space. Is it really that objectionable that he makes a living from it?
My company uses both Laracasts and Envoyer extensively. Laracasts also turned us onto Vue.js, which is a great Javascript framework that is used extensively by the Laravel community, and for good reason.
Envoyer provides seamless deployments of your projects, and we have found it invaluable for our releases. We’re more than happy that Taylor Otwell is compensated in some way for providing both the service and the phenomenal Laravel framework to start with.
Laravel provides first-class documentation, as if it were a commercial product, and yet it’s free. As the leader of a company that relies on Laravel, I’m very excited and grateful for everything they do.
Another point I’ve heard from people is that Laravel updates too often, with big releases twice a year. That means you have to migrate if you want to keep up to date, and that can be a pain. But would you rather update less often and incur technical debt? Who in their right mind would want that? Eventually you will have to address technical debt and nothing is more ugly than that…
Laravel, and it’s supporting ecosystem, is capable of powering enterprise applications. Recently, I mentioned a cliche in one of my books, 100 Patterns For Success, where I talk about the joke from the show Silicon Valley, where an engineer says:
“I want to change the world with a beautiful architecture that maximizes code reuse and extensibility.”
Everyone says that. Taylor Otwell actually did it with Laravel.
Thanks again to everyone who is following my work, and thanks again for all the great reviews on Laravel 5.4 For Beginners, I really appreciate it.
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