Why State of PHP 2024 is all about Laravel

Earlier this month, State of PHP 2024 was published by JetBrains. I am a regular reader of JetBrains blog since I think the people behind the creators of tools like PHPStorm and other useful developer tools are always worth reading. But the latest State of PHP post, was more, well, very Laravel-heavy. Let me explain why.

State of PHP Laravel

Let’s talk about the formalities first: there are quotes from 5 different persons — the creator of Laravel, a woman described as “Laravel Developer”, Nuno Maduro — who describes hisself as Laravel core team member — and Brent, the creator of the article, stating:

13 years ago, someone on the PHP subreddit wrote: ‘Laravel is my favorite framework right now. But deep down I wish I was a symfony2 guru and drove a nicer car.’ It’s intriguing to see how the PHP community has shifted in the past decade: Laravel used to be the underdog, but now it’s the most popular framework by far. What I think adds to Laravel’s success is its focus on code usability over ‘being correct’: 95% of the time, it just works. Combine that with a very strong community, both online and offline, and you get a recipe for success. Laravel’s journey is truly inspiring, and I think every programmer should be aware of it.

The Article Content

Let’s move forward with the content: the article is divided into a few chapters, addressing frameworks, development/testing environments, code quality tools and the adoption of AI. While the development environment content is important for Jetbrains itself, the framework and testing chapters are — in my opinion — Laravel biased.

For instance, according to the article, 61% of the developers use Laravel, followed by WordPress (23%), Symfony (21%) and much more. The chapter, however, is opened by a quote by Taylor Otwell, the creator of Laravel.
Now, we can argue that according to the graphics shown, Laravel is the most widely used framework, and therefore, the creator of Laravel is placed where he is placed. However, I had the feeling of a Laravel bias while reading it.

Similar with testing: I am aware that PHPUnit is dominating testing in PHP — followed by Pest according to the graphics in the article. Having a closer look to Pest, the framework is created by Nuno Maduro — remember? The Laravel core team member — promoted by the Laravel community and getting Platinum sponsorship by Laracasts, a Laravel learning platform.

Conclusion

The article is not all about this, by far. But there is a bias visible and that is a great pity — there are so many bigger and smaller frameworks and tools, doing great job in what they do. For instance, why are no opinions from the CodeIgniter (11%) and Slim (3%) present? Why are topics like clean code, object oriented PHP and similar disciplines not present in the report — since version 7, the PHP programming language has undergone an evolution from type-weak & non-object-oriented towards strict typing and a clear object-oriented approach. I am convinced the bigger picture would be a different one in that case.

Saying this, I do not want to say the Jetbrains blog team, Laravel or Pest doing bad jobs — quite the opposite: many developers are happy with Laravel and I also was involved in projects of bigger companies building successful applications with it. I would just like to put my observations into words with this article and would be pleased if this is understood as constructive criticism.