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Comment by stef25 | Hacker News Reader

As a Laravel dev for my main and side gigs, who also had to use React, Next, GraphQL and a whole bunch of other JS tools I can safely say nothing comes close to the full Laravel stack.

It's certainly been mentioned a million times before here but the JS ecosystem is just a shitshow. It's certainly capable, but so f*cking complicated.

Just on the page linked here there's yet another three tools I hadn't heard of before (Redwood, Blitz, Adonis) + mentions of Prisma for DB access and stuff built on Next, which is built on React. And then there's Typescript.

When is this insanity going to stop.

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Laravel stack looks like a shopping list to me. Weird names for services the Laravel company wants you to buy.

Creating a company selling solutions around a web framework is weird thing.

Only ever purchased one thing, Forge. And that's for managing servers, at which it's pretty good.

Nice! To expand on my original point I don't understand how someone new to Laravel can take the ecosystem seriously[1].

There is zero distinction here as to what is external to the framework and what's built in. Some ecosystem parts require a payment or a subscription and some don't.

The naming is the worst offender. How am I supposed to know what Envoyer does? Rails does this to an extent but it's easy to understand at a glance that Action Mailer can be used to send emails.

[1] https://pasteboard.co/1ogXkvldN47I.jpg

Not least in part to DHH setting the tone years ago; but yeah naming is hard enough without "creative branding"

[0] https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/hunting-for-great-names-in...

It's all explained very clearly in the docs.

> How am I supposed to know what Envoyer does?

If you google "Laravel Envoyer" the first result tells you "Envoyer - Zero Downtime PHP Deployment". You don't even need to click. "Envoyer" in French means "to send", not sure if that's why they picked it.

This costs money but it's for deployments so you don't even need it. Just deploy as you normally would with a git hook.

You can also deploy with Envoy, where you write a simple script that executes ssh commands (git fetch, pull, composer install, ...). Envoy is free. Obviously you're free to deploy whichever way you would.

Personally I either use Envoy (free) or an ssh script that listens for git hooks.

They don't cripple the framework in any way though. You can get full experience and all features without spending anything.

I am so sad that Blitz.js kind of… well, I’m not sure what it did, but it didn’t Ruby/Rails.

And my IDE had a reeeeally hard time keeping up because of its size. All the defaults were “sensible” as advertised, but the codebase was massive when I hopped off. Maybe it’s improved? This is my sign to check back in.

Which IDE? I'm using RubyMine (just because it's what I'm used to, and it works well with typescript anyway) and I'm not having that kind of issues.

I really like developing with Rails (with or without React, depending on how complex the UI needs to be). In a recent project, though, I had to use a Node.js backend for something where it was OK to choose a somewhat experimental tech stack.

I picked Blitz.js, and I have to say that this is the closest experience I had so far to Rails level rapid development with a Javascript back-end tech; not having to worry about client-server communication is just great. It's a pity that Blitz is nowhere as stable and well documented yet, but it's very very promising.

I just hope that Blitz will grow in adoption and stability, and not become an abandonware like so many other promising JS projects in the past.

And it's complexity for no good reason. There's still 3+ different ways to do modules and configure that in the build. And I extremely don't care - the build system knows about them, so why is it even a thing that's exposed to / can fail for me?

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