Ask HN: Do you prefer Laravel or Ruby on Rails for your projects? Why? - bgdkbtv
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danpalmer
Laravel, Rails, Django, and a few others, are all pretty much interchangeable.

If you want the right framework for your productivity, choose the one that
uses the language you have most experience with.

If you want the one that is fastest, re-evaluate your choices, none of these
are "fast".

If you want the one that gives you the most maintainable code, I think that
might be Django, but highly dependent on the first point, and I'm biased on
this.

If you want the one where the code looks nicest, go for Rails, it's again
subjective, but Ruby code is often very pretty (debatable whether thats
useful).

If you want the one that is easiest to deploy, go for Laravel, you can stick a
bunch of files in a webroot on shared hosting and it might work.

I don't prefer any one of these, each is better for different people, teams,
requirements and restrictions, but none of these is a clear winner.

~~~
bgdkbtv
Good points!

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cupofjoakim
I prefer rails. It might not be the fastest, but the rails way is very close
to my ideal way of doing things and the community is so wide and pleasant to
be in. There's gems for a lot of stuff and there's people inspecting gems for
security issues.

It's also very easy to take in any developer and have them learn ruby. Rails
is a bit more strict but if there's a "mentor" available I'd say it's a quick
process to get new devs up and running.

~~~
bgdkbtv
Most of what you said is also true for Laravel. There are packages, a very
large and friendly community.

About the mentor.. I think Jeffrey Way is the only mentor you need when you're
developing with Laravel :D

Your ideal way of doing things as in MVC structure or what do you mean
exactly?

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TurboHaskal
They're both high quality and pretty similar in terms of features. Use the one
whose language you're most comfortable with.

Just kidding, rewrite everything in Go.

~~~
bgdkbtv
Ha, definitely will consider this :D

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ezekg
I prefer Rails solely because of Ruby. (And I'm more productive in it.) I'm
not a huge fan of PHP, but I know that's probably because I started my career
as a WP developer, so I still have that hatred looming in the back of my mind.
Either way, Laravel also looks top notch and I periodically check out
Laracasts to keep up to date on where it's going.

~~~
bgdkbtv
Don't know if you're still developing for WP, but I hated it so much until I
came acros roots.io. Their bedrock installation and sage theme are a breeze to
work with. So much better than anything else I've tried.

~~~
andrei_says_
Is there anything that allows using templates with wp instead of the
unbearable fragmented patchwork of functions and code?

Something like twig maybe?

I come from rails and trying to develop for Wordpress caused a lot of wtf and
disgust.

~~~
bgdkbtv
WP is terrible with its template inheritance, and Sage theme essentially
solves that problem for you.

You will need to write absolute minimum for your templates using standard PHP.
Here is a link to their latest beta version which uses webpack and all the new
goodies: [https://github.com/roots/sage](https://github.com/roots/sage)

However, if you're more comfortable with using Twig, there is a fork of Sage
that uses Twig: [https://github.com/studiorabota/sage-twig-
theme](https://github.com/studiorabota/sage-twig-theme) (but it uses gulp and
older tech).

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rando444
Laravel hands down.

It's easy to learn, there are lots of good resources, and it's growing in
popularity.

Ruby tries to force you to do things in a certain way, and quite often people
just end up programming their way around the framework instead of using it the
way it was intended. This is probably true for any framework, but anecdotally
I see this happen more in ruby.

I think the big factors are where your skills lie, and whether or not you are
going to have other people working on the project. If you are, I would choose
Laravel, as it's much easier to find php developers than it is to find ruby
developers and even the php developers that don't know Laravel can usually
pick it up quickly.

Again, this is just my own experience.

~~~
collyw
I don't know Larval but i do know Django.

Django doesn't force you to do things it's own way but when you do go for the
Django way everything else is so much easier. Class Based Views, for example
are a bit difficult at first, but once you get the hang of them its fast to
produce nice maintainable code.

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saluki
I moved from Rails to Laravel due to clients/projects.

I like both, I prefer Laravel.

Great community, easy to reach out and connect with people.

I like the frequent releases, always great new features coming out.

Amazing packages.

LaravelShift.com is a great tool to updating repos to the next release.

Deployment is a breeze with forge and envoyer.

It's fun to develop in.

~~~
bgdkbtv
Yeah agree with you. And deploying it even without Forge and Envoyer is a
breeze. Spin up a DO instance and git pull from your repo and point nginx root
to pulled down repo and you're good to go, almost :)

Laravel is great, and I find PHP a lot prettier and easier than Ruby. Just
wondering why all the big start ups are using Ruby on Rails? Twitter, AirBnB,
BrainTree, Shopify. Literally no big startup uses Laravel, other than Slack,
which is just PHP.

~~~
BMorearty
One possible reason: Laravel didn't exist when any of those companies started.

~~~
bgdkbtv
That is exactly what I missed! Great point and now it all makes sense!

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nerdywordy
At the risk of being flagged hipster, I used to prefer Laravel, but I've
migrated almost completely to Elixir & Phoenix. I just find myself infinitely
more productive in a functional environment. Perhaps it just clicks better for
me.

~~~
bgdkbtv
Care to explain why you prefer Elixir + Phoenix set up to Laravel? Always
interested to learn new tech

