As someone who can't stand PHP, Laravel is pretty much the only thing that's made me feel like the language has some worth. It feels very similar to the Python and Ruby frameworks I'm used to, and is actually pretty nice to read.
Now if only the rest of the PHP devs stuck in 2005 would switch to it...
What does Laravel do that other frameworks like FuelPHP and Yii don't do? I hear a lot about it but don't hear a lot about why it's so much better than others.
On the surface most of the popular PHP frameworks are not much different from each other. Basic MVC separation, some sort of dependency injection container (actually a service locator), Composer and standardized autoloading, etc. Once you dig into the coding aesthetics then the differences start to become clear. Yii isn't PSR compliant, both FuelPHP and Laravel make liberal use of Facades and/or __callStatic to preserve the style of static function calls that are prevalent in CodeIgniter. I guess what makes Laravel stand out is the sheer amount of documentation and examples that are available, both on the website and in the code itself. This makes it really easy to get started.
Me, I'm not really keen on the Component::function() syntax. Feels like a crutch to me. Especially when people go out of their way to avoid specifying namespaces by abusing class_alias. Plus you're not really saving that many keystrokes compared to, say, $this->app['component']->function(). (Yes, I like Silex).
$this->app['component']->function() gives me an instant headache. Which is why I always wind up giving up on Symfony/Silex after trying it out every now and then.
OTOH, I had a much easier time with Laravel, though it uses some of the same Symfony components under the hood.
Laravel has a half decent API and doesn't rely overmuch on (untestable) static functions. My evaluation of FuelPHP was admittedly brief, but let's take another look:
For those who may be unaware, the issue with static functions is that, if you are calling a static method, you will execute that method. You're not able to choose not to execute that method (unless you do something surpassingly stupid like checking whether you're in test mode), and you can't generally make that method return anything other than what it normally does. Isolating that static method is rather difficult, and if that static method happens to call another one, well, it had better not be an issue with your test, because you're not going to stop it happening.
I know the FuelPHP devs have gone on record saying that Fuel doesn't rely heavily on static methods, and that static methods aren't a problem, and that to the degree to which there is a problem, they are gonna fix it, but...
Here we compare CakePHP, Laravel, and FuelPHP (Thank you to Sebastian Bergmann for providing the statistics utility). For anyone actually evaluating these platforms, you may want to check out these benchmarks as well:
Without saying anything about how easy or fast it would be to develop for each of them, it seems that for trivial tasks Laravel > Fuel > Cake. From the code statistics, we have:
Fuel: 785 static methods (22.45%)
Cake: 530 static methods (7.96%)
Yii: 483 static methods (7.95%)
Laravel: 0 (0.00%)
Laravel seems pretty light as far as that goes, and generally when I'm faced with a large project I want the framework to be large as well. I feel like otherwise I'm going to end up finding or writing libraries for things that I feel like the framework should take care of. I would have a hard time recommending a PHP framework, imo they're all pretty much crap. Laravel is not better per se than other frameworks, but it does (far) less, and therefore does it less badly. Divine intervention alone will fix the PHP world at this point, but if you can avoid CodeIgniter, Yii, and FuelPHP, probably no other choices will be as bad.
