Laravel Review

While at Tulsa Tech Fest, I attended a class that introduced a small framework, Laravel. Laravel is a “Clean & Classy PHP Framework, which offers a bit more than I expected. I’ll quickly go over a few things I like and dislike about this framework.

One neat feature I like is that it supports custom “routes”. The current version doesn’t use the URI to find the controller; instead it looks through all the routes you already set up until it finds a match. This unique feature gives you a bit more control over the client visible URI. After speaking with the creator, he did confirm that the custom routes and using the URI to find the controller will both be in the next version of Laravel.

I find it difficult to extend the core. One of the first things I wanted to try was to add MSSQL Database support to the framework. After looking around, I realized I would need to modify a core page and add another file. It would be a bit nicer if the database “drivers” were in a separate folder, and it simply scanned and cached this or looked for the file when it was needed. That way anybody can add the driver without modifying core code. This could possibly be fixed by adding “hooks” inside of the core code as well and putting all drivers in an array.

(Source: Skynet Solutions)

By Blaine Schmeisser