I think Laravel has increased recent popularity more than Zend

I think Laravel has increased recent popularity far more than Zend, which is very very sluggish, bloated, and very outdated and old school. Laravel is modern, fast, and beautiful. Many people that did not like PHP prior to Laravel, now use PHP because of Laravel. Thats my opinion!

Yes, I also heard that Zend has broken backwards compatibility in new major version.

Anyway, the PHP framework movement seems to be moved by fashion. Each year a new framework seems to be hyped by those that hyped some other framework last year, so it is natural that next year, some PHP developers will praise something else, and what they praised in the past they will call it old fashion.

What seems to never go out of fashion is Wordpress with its huge plugin ecosystem.

Anyway, what matters for me is that each develop follows a consistent Web development that makes them productive. It could be a current, past or future framework, or even no framework at all, as long they are productive and Web development projects come out productively.

The thing with laravel is it is now version 4 and is like 3-4 years old now and it is constantly improving the language as a whole, pushing developers to use "proper" code and following good design patterns. All I am saying is I believe Laravel is a lot more than just hype and many others agree that it is the best thing to happen to PHP in many years. I have been using PHP myself since it was first released so I am also old school and have seen it all and I just am really happy with what Laravel has done for the PHP community as a whole. PHP developers were heading down a road where we were the laughing stock of the dev community an now with Laravel, many consider it better than Ruby on Rails and other competitor language/frameworks. As for WordPress I also agree WordPress is definitely a contributor and I use WordPress all the time too...I love it just as much. I think frameworks like Zend, Symfony, Codeigniter are a thing of the past though...thats just my thoughts on the subject, who really knows

My feeling is that those that push new frameworks are contrarians. They seek the new new thing. So a framework is only great until the next framework comes and becomes the new new thing, and so on.

Looking at Quora it does not seem the campaigns against PHP have stopped.

quora.com/search?q=php+bad

It seems to be of the same type of contrarians of the framework fans, except they prefer some other non-dominant language, Ruby, Python, whatever.

I don't think they respect more or less PHP because of Laravel or whatever. They always have excuses against PHP. At most some say good things about Laravel because it is now the new new thing, while Ruby On Rails and Django became old, so they are not new anymore.

Anyway, I would not be concerned because contrarians are usually a noisy minority looking for attention. It is better to ignore them because some of them are a bit trollish.

As for PHP frameworks, on the up side, it is good there are new frameworks trying succeed older frameworks. It is a sign the community is active and hopefully evolving to some extent.

That's not very fair to make such assumptions. I for one like and use Laravel only because it uses the latest, best practices with newer PHP versions as well as has a super striving community. Based on your comments, I can tell that you have not looked at Laravel or givent it the attention it deserves and it seems your reason is ONLY because you are saying only people that asnt the "col" new thing will use Laravel. I can speak for myself and that is not the case at all. I prefer no frameworks until Laravel came out. Now I develop mainly with Laravel, WordPress, SugarCRM, and Magento.

You really should look into Laravel with a That's not very fair to make such assumptions. I for one like and use Laravel only because it uses the latest, best practices with newer PHP versions as well as has a super striving community. Based on your comments, I can tell that you have not looked at Laravel or given it the attention it deserves and it seems your reason is ONLY because you are saying only people that wasn't the "cool" new thing will use Laravel. I can speak for myself and that is not the case at all. I prefer no frameworks until Laravel came out. Now I develop mainly with Laravel, WordPress, SugarCRM, and Magento.

You really should look into Laravel with a more fair approach and you might be really surprised. When it came out myself and many others were skeptical just like you are but as soon as I was fair and looked at it I realized it uses all the best practices, design patterns, and has one of the most unique architectures of any, framework I have studied and I* have studied them all in dept as for several years I was working on building my own "dream/perfect framework" that is until I gave Lar fair approach and you might be really surprised. When it came out myself and many others were skeptical just like you are but as soon as I was fair and looked at it I realized it uses all the best practices, design patterns, and has one of the most unique architectures of any, framework I have studied and I* have studied them all in dept as for several years I was working on building my own "dream/perfect framework" that is until I gave Laravel a fair chance and review and I abandoned my framework project of 3 year as Laravel is nearly perfect in my view and much better than what I was building even.

Laravel is often compared to the Ruby on Rails framework as the Eloquent portion is like an active-record type implementation so it is super each to manipulate your database with CRUD type actions and API endpoint and much, much, more...You are not being fair in your review...if you disregard your current thoughts on it based strictly on your thoughts that people just like it because it;s hip and new, if you give it a valid and fair review, I don't see how you could not be impressed with it;s flexibility, performance, ease of use, and what many like is the language is very expressive... Functions and actions and such are named and sound like what they are meant to do...little things like that are why it;s often related to9 Rails framework for Ruby. Check it out before you know it!

Sorry, I think I was not very clear.

There is nothing wrong with using those frameworks.

The fact is that in my opinion there are better ways to develop PHP applications that do not require using those frameworks.

The way I see it those frameworks just represent minor increments when comparison to other frameworks they copied. Before Laravel there was Symfony, before Symfony there was Zend, before Zend there was CodeIgniter, before CodeIgniter, there was Cake, before Cake there was Ruby on Rails, before Ruby on Rails there were Java frameworks.

Although there was an evolution, they still are stuck with complex approaches to solve problems.

I could enumerate lots of complication issues but I would take forever and it would lead us nowhere because framework developers are in love with their work and usually are not able to evolve upon criticism. If I bother to criticize again, I would be taken as an enemy rather than an experienced developer others could learn from.

Anyway, I already mentioned a few issues in this article before.

phpclasses.org/blog/post/226-4-Reas ...

My point is that I have better methods that make me more productive because they are less complicated, require writing less code and I do not need to include huge framework libraries.

That does not mean that you should not use Laravel or other libraries. If you already invested time and effort to learn Laravel, you may be more productive than you used to be when you used some other framework.

I do not see a problem there, I just suspect that in the future there will be yet another framework claiming to be better than Laravel and you will be urged to switch to it.