I’ve been reading up on Laravel, Symfony and Zend. Some of the criticism surrounding Larevel is that its usefulness decreases as projects become larger/enterprise level in comparison to something like Zend. Furthermore, there is a concern that while Laravel might be hot right now in a few years time it will be a comodity like CodeIgnitor or even Cake. In comparison people seem to hold true to the fact that Symfony will stand the test of time as will Zend since both have already been adapter by major vendors in open source realm and corporate empires.
I’ve used both Zend 1 and Symfony 2 a year or two back. Having went through the recent docs for all of them I don’t understand how Laravel isn’t on the same playing field as the others. In fact it seems a little higher given it is essentially another layer on top of Symfony. So my question comes down to for long terms projects that need to scale and have continuous integration work done do any of these frameworks have significant disadvantages over the other because I don’t think so.
I’m planning on using Laravel w/ Angular JS to build a new age social sports gambling application. From what I have gathered so far none of these frameworks really seem to have any major disadvantages over the other though Laravel seems to impress me the most especially database layer eloquent.
The application that I will be building contains three critical pieces. The first is a front-end driven by angular JS using a restful service layer. This will make up both the front-end and back-end admin interface to place wagers and accept bets. The admin (back-end) will be used for office purposes and carry out admin tasks. The second portion will include various middle ware interacting with various vendor services to update a local database with sports statistics data needed to resolve wagers placed on the front-end. The third and final piece will be a payment system based on purchase of credits for end users to place and accept sports wagers. I’m aware of the legal issues. So lets stay away from comments on that and strictly the question at hand.
I’m thinking this can all be accomplished with Laravel and some added libs without any major obstacles or scale/performance implications. thoughts, agree/disagree?