Ask HN: What non PHP framework resembles the structure/deployment of Laravel/Yii

2 points by steven_braham 8 years ago | 6 comments

PHP has been my main language for years, but I want to learn other languages to create web apps. The thing I like the most of PHP is how easy it is to deploy and develop an application. When deploying your app, you only have to update the files with a file transfer or a deployment script, because a PHP interpreter is always running.

Furthermore, all PHP frameworks like Yii, Laravel and CodeIgniter follow the same conventions for structuring a project.

I've tried to learn Django and like the syntax. However, I don't like the idea that a project contains multiple apps. I prefer to have large applications that do multiple things. Also, the whole template/view part is a bit confusing for me.

I'm curious what other platforms/languages are the most similar to the structure and deployment of Yii and Laravel projects.

The Java play framework seems like an interesting option.

mtmail 8 years ago |

Ruby on Rails. You'll immediately notice an 'app' directory. Resources are in app/assets, controllers in app/controllers, models in app/models and views in app/views. There's a routes.rb file and a command line interface ('rake routes' does the same as 'php artisan routes:list', 'rake db:migrate' is the same as 'php artisan migrate').

While you can deploy Rails by just copying files (it will reload classes and recompile assets on page refresh whenever possible) it's still a best practice to have the dev and production environment different.

steven_braham 8 years ago | |

Damm RoR is nearly Laravel with a different syntax. Development and deployment is also very easy. I was always wary of RoR, because I read online that it's so good at simplifying and abstracting stuff, it can become a black box that is hard to debug.

However, apart from that, this is exactly what I sought. Thank you for making me reconsider Ruby :)

rubyfan 8 years ago |

steven_braham 8 years ago | |

I saw that thread before, but nothing really appealed to me.

rubyfan 8 years ago | | |

Same, except Laravel was new to me in that thread. Looks pretty similar to what you get with Rails but for PHP.

Given the criteria I laid out in that post it looks viable. I’m honestly surprised since I left PHP for Ruby about 12-13 years ago. I think Cake was the wannabe at that point which must have been PHP 4 or 5. There was much I disliked then but Laravel seems better.

So I’ll pose the question, does Laravel have a compelling feature which you think makes it better than Rails or do you think they’re about even?