Laravel has transformed the way developers build modern web applications with PHP. What once was a landscape dominated by bloated legacy codebases and spaghetti logic is now populated with clean, expressive, and powerful applications—thanks in no small part to Laravel’s elegance, tooling, and vibrant ecosystem.
In this post, I’ll break down why Laravel continues to be my framework of choice, how it empowers scalable development, and some best practices I’ve learned over the years.
Why Laravel?
Laravel isn’t just another PHP framework—it’s a developer-first ecosystem. Taylor Otwell created Laravel with the goal of making common web development tasks like routing, authentication, and caching both enjoyable and efficient.
Clean & Elegant Syntax
Laravel is expressive. It reads almost like pseudocode. Whether it’s defining a route or setting up model relationships, everything feels natural.
Route::get('/posts', [PostController::class, 'index']);
Rich Features Set Out of the Box
- Routing, Middleware, Controllers – Cleanly structured.
- Authentication & Authorization – Laravel Breeze, Jetstream, Sanctum, and Passport.
- Queues & Jobs – Redis + Laravel Horizon for smooth background processing.
- API Support – API resources, rate limiting, and built-in support for JSON responses.
Tools Every Laravel Developer Should Use
Laravel is more than just a framework—it’s a platform. Here are some tools I consider essential:
Testing: Laravel Pest & PHPUnit
Laravel makes testing not just possible, but pleasant. With Pest, you can write expressive tests with zero boilerplate.
Monitoring: Laravel Telescope & Horizon
- Telescope gives deep insight into requests, exceptions, and DB queries.
- Horizon lets you visualise and manage queues—crucial for apps handling large volumes of background jobs.
Laravel Artisan
From generating code to running migrations, Artisan is your command-line wizard:
php artisan make:model Post -mcr
This one-liner creates a Model, Migration, Controller, and Resource class.
Laravel + Modern Frontend: SPA & SSR
Laravel plays very nicely with:
- Vue.js / React via Inertia.js
- Alpine.js + Livewire for minimal JS reactivity
- Tailwind CSS out-of-the-box with Breeze/Jetstream