Worked on a project that was initially built using Symfony. The original work was well done, however the intial developer couldn’t continue due to a conflict of interest, and so the project was outsourced overseas. I could get into details on how bad it was, but that is the topic for another day.

When looking at solutions we considered several frameworks - CodeIgniter, Laravel and Symphony where among the choices. Ultimately we chose Laravel as it seemed to have the best multilanguage management, and the task scheduling it offered provided some answers to a few challenges we had. It seemed like a perfect fit.

Working with Laravel was a great experience. There is a strong culture of Test Driven Development. There is a wealth of instructions out there that can help you get running relatively quickly. I say relatively because even with the great resources, it still take a lot of time to setup and configure everything.

I ended up running into a lot of problems - some of the larger ones where

  • Language support was problematic - Overall it did work, but it didn’t support resources at the time, and it also cause some other issues (below)
  • I couldn’t unit test (multilingual support caused an error that prevented unit tests from running)
  • Task scheduling option we chose was bugged, and while they did fix it in an updated version - that update didn’t work on our servers OS.

Overall, once the setup was done Laravel was great to work with. It felt a lot like Ruby, but with faster performance. If I was to do another large project I would consider it. It’s not worth it for smaller projects simply because of the setup time.

Update

Ultimately the language support wasn’t great and conflicted with testing. Also laravel version changes, and dealing with dependencies made it a real pain in the rear.