Taylor Otwell - History & Philosophy of Laravel

March 14 2013, 1:45am

I learned a lot about the history of Laravel from this introductory talk by the founder Taylor Otwell at the first Laravel Conference (2013).

  • 2:48 - The Vision: aka Otwell's inspiration. I didn't realize that Otwell used to be a big CodeIgniter fan. This is probably why I was naturally attracted to Laravel when I first discovered it. It fills a lot of the gaps the CI community wanted filled.
  • 4:12 - Why create a new framework? Why not fork?
  • 8:05 - Documentation is king. Since CI was known for its' simple/clear docs, Otwell realizes how important good docs are to attracting new developers.
  • 9:15 - Important features of Laravel: Routing, Eliquent, Blade templating, and Auth.
  • 11:35 - How Laravel is leveraging the Symfony community.
  • 13:05 - Embracing Composer for dependencies.
  • 14:25 - New features in Laravel 4: Mail, password reminders, job queue.
  • 17:26 - Did he consider Zend? Not really, he mentions he was fairly new to the PHP landscape at the time and hadn't really tried it.
  • 19:30 - Building a community.
  • 33:50 - The name Laravel comes from rhyming with castle Cair Paravel in Narnia.

Want to learn more about Laravel? Check out the Laravel 4 Video Tutorials.