[afraca]

I have about 7 years of professional Laravel experience. I think it's quite slick! There is one aspect I haven't seen mentioned here that frustrates me: the community is quite eager to make new shiny things and forget about existing things. I feel the core framework doesn't get a lot of love anymore, and the same for some other packages. Something like Homestead got introduced as a huge thing, but got relatively quickly replaced with Sail and Valet it kind of seems. (Yes, they have a bit different corners, but I would say it doesn't justify a complete package) For authentication you have multiple packages that were introduced as the holy grail but now sit in an awkward spot with each other, and similar for frontend things packages.

Another small frustration for me is all the huge adjectives being used: - "Laravel Horizon provides a beautiful dashboard ... "

  - "Laravel Jetstream is a beautifully designed application... "

  - "Laravel Octane supercharges your application's performance..."

  - "Laravel Prompts is a PHP package for adding beautiful and user-friendly forms  ... "

  - "Laravel Reverb brings blazing-fast and scalable real-time WebSocket ..."

  - "Laravel Sanctum provides a featherweight authentication system ... "

  - "Laravel Telescope makes a wonderful companion ..."

  - "In other words, Valet is a blazing fast Laravel development environment ..."

I think it would we wise to do a bit of a cleanup and merging of official packages, and to not forget about the core framework. I think Symfony shows you can still do great additions even after many years like Targeted Value Resolvers [0]

You can see all the official packages clicking the "Ecosystem" button in the header of laravel.com

[0] https://symfony.com/blog/new-in-symfony-6-3-targeted-value-r...

[ofrzeta]

> the community is quite eager to make new shiny things and forget about existing things.

When I got into the Laravel ecosystem I had high hopes for all packages made by Spatie (Belgian Laravel agency). Later I noticed that the packages aren't all that great (or: very opinionated, less idiomatic) and that I fell for their great marketing. The packages sometimes are more of a self-promotion device. Also some of them are open core only (for instance media library has a corresponding media library pro).

Relating to your other point they aren't only "created" but "crafted" as so many other "artisan" in the web programming space, maybe especially in the Laravel world :)

So, if working with Laravel be sure to take everything with a huge grain of salt.

Next time I'll start a PHP project I'll probably go with Symfony.

[blerb795]

> Another small frustration for me is all the huge adjectives being used

wow you weren't kidding -- the docs [0] for each of the "packages" could easily be confused with AI-generated text written as a joke

[0] https://laravel.com/docs/11.x/octane

[begueradj]

Never read similar self praise about every library, package, framework and programming language that exists?

[KronisLV]

> I think it would we wise to do a bit of a cleanup and merging of official packages, and to not forget about the core framework.

Isn't this an issue that most enterprise frameworks end up with?

For example, if you look at the Spring ecosystem, there's also quite a few packages: https://spring.io/projects and https://start.spring.io/ (if you click on the "add dependencies", it integrates with a lot of stuff)

[begueradj]

I agree with what you mentioned. But don't you think the same holds true for every other web framework and related packages?