I chose Laravel.
I’m pretty sure I have some kind of problem that makes me want to try all sorts of alternatives for frameworks, languages, themes, apps… yeah everything.
Healti was written in Typescript with Nuxt and Supabase, and I like these technologies. There were a few problems though:
- I kept trying new stuff
- I don’t like JavaScript and TypeScript
- I don’t like frontend frameworks in general
- I rewrote (easily, but still) basic functionality like authentication, which I’d prefer to be battle-tested
- I wanted something more backend-centric
So, I considered:
- Go with Gin, Fiber, or even just the standard library
- Ruby with Rails
- Python with Django or FastAPI
- PHP with Laravel
Go’s solution is way too minimal, Rails is interesting, FastAPI is too minimal as well, and I didn’t try any demo with Django (for some reason I tried to stay away from Python).
I would’ve used HTMX with Go/Python, Hotwire with Rails, and Livewire or HTMX with Laravel.
Well, since I had already worked with Laravel once, and I love how fast you can get an app running with it (not just development but even deployment with Forge), I went with it.
I don’t get the hate for PHP, plus I heard the newest versions got rid of all the problems that probably caused the hate.
Some modules from the Laravel ecosystems I love and I’m working a lot with: Blade for templating, Eloquent as the ORM, the authentication system, Forge with a provider (I use Hetzner but I also recommend Vultr) for deployment and server management, Breeze as a starter.
I already rebuilt the current core feature of the app: the OCR-powered automatic health data manager. I have to add complementary features but I have no doubts about how smooth the experience will be with Laravel.