Laravel / Composer : Skate To Where The Puck Is Going To Be
By Spicer Matthews
“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”
~Wayne Gretzky
Steve Jobs brought Gretzky’s quote to the computer world’s attention in 2007, and since then I have always kept these words in the back of my mind. At Cloudmanic, we like to make decisions based on this philosophy as well.
As many of you know, Cloudmanic Labs is a PHP / CodeIgniter development shop. We have been loyal to both of these technologies from the very early days. But things have changed: PHP is moving forward at a nice pace; CodeIgniter is not. As a firm, we can stay with the puck or skate to where it is going. Internally, we have made the decision to invest our time in Laravel along with Composer.
PHP has, for a while now, introduced two very powerful features: namespacing and autoloading. CodeIgniter, on the other hand, simply has not embraced these ideas. As a consequence, senior developers who contribute powerful libraries to the open source community have moved on. The libraries that we have grown to rely on are now being developed in a way that does not mesh well with the core CodeIgniter framework.
Another factor in our choice is that we want to engage and attract the best development talent we can. It seems most of our development peers have started to embrace Laravel with an increased focus on using Composer with Laravel. What senior engineer wants to work on old technology? To stay relevant and attractive as a company, we need to stay on the cutting-edge.
If you have not already checkout Laravel and Composer do it now. You can thank me later :).