1. A Brief Intro
2. PHP? But why?
3. It'll take a while, but it's worth it

A Brief Intro

I am a self-taught developer who worked primarily with React and Express.js when I first began. Early on in my development journey, I relied on videos from channels like NetNinja and Academind to watch tutorials for how to bootstrap a full-stack web application with Express and React together, leaving me with a repo that often began looking like the following.

When I was asked to create a full-stack web application for my work using a tech stack of Laravel, Vue, MySQL, and Docker, I stopped looking at new features as a challenge and just picked the best solution, often existing packages. As someone who learns well through example and connecting the dots by seeing things in action, Laravel has broken down a lot of the perceived complexities of certain features (caching, queueing, etc).

But Laravel uses PHP, and therefore you lost me and my respect

I'm not going to and can't argue that learning PHP is worth your time based on your local job market. There are without a doubt PHP and Laravel jobs out there (although PHP can often mean WordPress and other CMS platforms) but it's understandable if you are not interested in working through a new language, especially one this archaic.

Laravel has a lot going on, and it will take time

My first few weeks learning Laravel were pretty frustrating, I felt like anytime I wanted to understand one concept I had to look up two or three additional terms.

Pagination

return Posts::paginate(15);

Here's the simplest way to paginate results from one table. After viewing the JSON response

{
  "current_page": 1,
  "data": [...]
  "next_page_url": null,
  "path": "http://localhost:8000/api/posts",
  "per_page": 15,
  "prev_page_url": "null",
  "to": 25,
  "total": 25
}

it was clear to me what is necessary to get pagination working. So if you were to implement pagination from scratch the only two things you have to know from the client are:

• what page is being requested (current page)
• The number of results per page (set by a user or hard-coded like example)

Request Caching

I always wondered, isn't implementing caching for a website extremely complicated? Well, yes and no. All you have to do is specify the key-value pair of your cached data, and how long you want to cache it for. The simplest way to get started is a database but you could imagine a route working like this:

Route::get('/', function() {
  $users = Cache::remember('users', 60, function () {
    return DB::table('users')->get();
  });

  return $users;
});

Managing your Database

Previously, when I just built everything on my own to "learn" I would probably have a SQL data dump after configuring my database for the first time. As I built out my tables I would occasionally dump the newest version of the database so I could recreate it. This led to a variety of issues, for a variety of reasons. I was terrified to modify my schema because it meant modifying my database and dumping it or writing a large SQL query. Neither were preferable and both were impossible to roll back easily.
Laravel taught me about the wonderful world of migrations, factories, and seeders that showed me the way for backend development. I won't even bother starting a project without first configuring that portion of my database so I can regularly refresh my database and version control my changes.

Migration files define our database schema.

To create a table in our database we would need this file

# users_migration.php
Schema::create('users', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->id();

    $table->string('name');
    $table->string('email')->unique();
    $table->timestamp('email_verified_at')->nullable();
    $table->string('password');
    $table->rememberToken();
    $table->foreignId('current_team_id')->nullable();
    $table->text('profile_photo_path')->nullable();

    $table->timestamps();
});

If we want to modify our database

# modify_users_table.php

# to add a birthYear column to our users table
Schema::table('users', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->integer('birthYear')->default(1900);
});

# to remove an existing column, for example profile photo path
Schema::table('users', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->dropColumn('birthYear');
});

The Point

In all honesty, if you have a smaller development team and need to implement a feature-rich web application, Laravel will work wonderfully. Nearly all services or features of modern web applications are accounted for in this framework along with a strong community and documentation.

So, I've loved my time using Laravel. PHP isn't perfect, and I wasn't super keen on brushing up on it but I learned so much in the process that I am extremely grateful I have.