A Short History of Web and PHP Frameworks

An important part of being able to answer the question “Why Laravel?” is understanding

Laravel’s history — and understanding what came before it. Prior to Laravel’s rise in

popularity, there were a variety of frameworks and other movements in PHP and other web

development spaces.

Ruby on Rails

David Heinemeier Hansson released the first version of Ruby on Rails in 2004, and it’s been

hard to find a web application framework since then that hasn’t been influenced by Rails in

some way.

Rails popularized MVC, RESTful JSON APIs, convention over configuration, ActiveRecord,

and many more tools and conventions that had a profound influence on the way web

developers approached their applications — especially with regard to rapid application

development.

The Influx of PHP Frameworks

It was clear to most developers that Rails, and similar web application frameworks, were the

wave of the future, and PHP frameworks, including those admittedly imitating Rails, starting

popping up quickly.

CakePHP was the first in 2005, and it was soon followed by Symfony, CodeIgniter, Zend

Framework, and Kohana (a CodeIgniter fork). Yii arrived in 2008, and Aura and Slim in

2010. 2011 brought FuelPHP and Laravel, both of which were not quite CodeIgniter offshoots,

but instead proposed as alternatives.

Some of these frameworks were more Rails-y, focusing on database object-relational

mappers (ORMs), MVC structures, and other tools targeting rapid development. Others, like Symfony and Zend, focused more on enterprise design patterns and ecommerce.

The Good and the Bad of CodeIgniter

CakePHP and CodeIgniter were the two early PHP frameworks that were most open about

how much their inspiration was drawn from Rails. CodeIgniter quickly rose to fame and by

2010 was arguably the most popular of the independent PHP frameworks.

CodeIgniter was simple, easy to use, and boasted amazing documentation and a strong

community. But its use of modern technology and patterns advanced slowly, and as the

framework world grew and PHP’s tooling advanced, CodeIgniter started falling behind in

terms of both technological advances and out-of-the-box features. Unlike many other

frameworks, CodeIgniter was managed by a company, and they were slow to catch up with

PHP 5.3’s newer features like namespaces and the moves to GitHub and later Composer. It was

in 2010 that Taylor Otwell, Laravel’s creator, became dissatisfied enough with CodeIgniter

that he set off to write his own framework.

Laravel 1, 2, and 3

The first beta of Laravel 1 was released in June 2011, and it was written completely from

scratch. It featured a custom ORM (Eloquent); closure-based routing (inspired by Ruby

Sinatra); a module system for extension; and helpers for forms, validation, authentication,

and more.

Early Laravel development moved quickly, and Laravel 2 and 3 were released in November

2011 and February 2012, respectively. They introduced controllers, unit testing, a commandline

tool, an inversion of control (IoC) container, Eloquent relationships, and migrations.

Laravel 4

With Laravel 4, Taylor rewrote the entire framework from the ground up. By this point

Composer, PHP’s now-ubiquitous package manager, was showing signs of becoming an

industry standard and Taylor saw the value of rewriting the framework as a collection of

components, distributed and bundled together by Composer.

Taylor developed a set of components under the code name Illuminate and, in May 2013,

released Laravel 4 with an entirely new structure. Instead of bundling the majority of its code

as a download, Laravel now pulled in the majority of its components from Symfony (another

framework that released its components for use by others) and the Illuminate components

through Composer.

Laravel 4 also introduced queues, a mail component, facades, and database seeding. And

because Laravel was now relying on Symfony components, it was announced that Laravel

would be mirroring (not exactly, but soon after) the six-monthly release schedule Symfony

follows.

Laravel 5

Laravel 4.3 was scheduled to release in November 2014, but as development progressed, it

became clear that the significance of its changes merited a major release, and Laravel 5 was

released in February 2015.

Laravel 5 featured a revamped directory structure, removal of the form and HTML helpers,

the introduction of the contract interfaces, a spate of new views, Socialite for social media

authentication, Elixir for asset compilation, Scheduler to simplify cron, dotenv for simplified

environment management, form requests, and a brand new REPL (read–evaluate–print loop).