When I started on this project as the sole developer, I was new to web development and I was looking at all of the web frameworks available for the job. I had some experience with Ruby on Rails and I had looked into .net for a bit, but when I found Laravel, it felt like the best framework for me to get the product to market. What made me choose Laravel was the easy to read documentation and active community. Rails had great documentation, but lacked some features built in that I wanted out of the box, while .net had a ton of video documentation tutorials, but nothing as straightforward as Laravels. So far, I am happy with the decision I made, and looking forward to the website release!
Sounds good that your website is being released soon. Laravel is a PHP framework. The mistake people make sometime is that they learn the framework without the language. I'd advice that you try to spend time learning PHP. You never know, you may need to scale the application later in the future, and PHP could come handy then.
Definitely. Actually, I have wrote a bit of php as part of the project and I think it has helped me get a better understanding of object oriented programming in general, due to the way Laravel is structured.
Could you, please, elaborate on "Rails had great documentation, but lacked some features built in that I wanted out of the box"?
Hey Zaijo, yes, so one thing Rails didn't have is authentication built in. This requires a ruby gem, which isn't hard to integrate, but as a new developer, I wanted to simplify everything as much as I could. Hope that makes sense. Also, their documentation is really good. I am sure a lot of people would disagree with me on my choice, but that was just my perspective as a total newbie. (:
I actually like the Ruby language better than PHP, but Laravel comes with some wonderful methods built in that have made the development time much faster.