[gchucky]

The other piece of this is Laravel Homestead (https://github.com/laravel/homestead), a Vagrant box to make local development easier. Through Forge, you can deploy basically the same environment Homestead provides to any of the services. It's an easier way of keeping your dev and prod environments the same.

[BenBradleySmith]

I really like the direction that Taylor has taken with Laravel in the past few months (Laracon). The creation of both Homestead and Forge will allow new users of the framework to quickly get started and removes many of the pain points that a lot of us have when starting out with web development.

If someone looking to start using a framework asked me which they should pick, I would recommend Laravel in a heartbeat. It has a friendly, active community, amazing resources to learn from (Laracasts and many books/articles) and now with Homestead and Forge it should allow a new user to get up and running in a matter of minutes.