Frameworks before Laravel:
There were variety of frameworks before Laravel’s rise in popularity. My vision of the post is to discuss about those frameworks.
- Ruby on Rails: Released by David Heinemeier Hansson in 2004, It;s pretty hard to find web applicaion framework. For rapid application development, web developers need MVC, RESTful JSON APIs, convention over configuration, ActiveRecord and many more tools and conventions, rails popularized all of it i mentioned earlier in the line.
- CakePHP: in 2005, it was first introduced.
- It was soon followed by Symfony, CodeIgniter, Zend Framework and Kohana.
- Yii arived in 2008
- Aura and Slim came in 2010
- in 2011, FuelPHP and Laravel introduced themselves as alternatives of CodeIgniter.
Popularity of CodeIgniter falls back:
Rails is the main inspiration of two early PHP frameworks ( CakePHP and CodeIgniter). Between these two, CodeIgniter gained popularity quickly by 2010 and established it as most popular independent PHP frameworks.
Why codeigniter becomes popular?
- simple
- easy to use
- boasted amazing documentation
- a strong community
When popularity of CodeIgniter falls back?
When newly developed frameworks come into market day by day and tools of PHP were getting advanced, CodeIgniter started falling behind in terms of technological advances and out-0f-the-box features. It was performing slow regarding to PHP 5.3’s new features like namespaces and the moves to GitHub and later composer. In 2010, Taylor Otwell, decided to write his own framework “Laravel” because he was dissatissfied with the performance of CodeIgniter.
