Show HN: Dumbo – Hono inspired framework for PHP

Out of curiosity, what do you dislike so much about Laravel?

1) *magic* 2) Its ORM of choice uses ActiveRecord pattern which I find to be hideous. DataMapper is far superior 3) Its weird facade patterns is terrible

I can (and have!) gone in-depth into my misgivings with Laravel, but it is fine for most projects and teams. It has elevated the average codebase quality throughout the PHP community and introduced many engineers to what PHP can do. Its creator and community have been a large net-positive to PHP as a whole.

I still prefer Symfony:

1) explicit 2) DataMapper ORM by default 3) What I am used to

Makes sense. I agree on the ORM. I actively don't use Eloquent when I use Laravel. It's fine for simple actions but I find it can get in the way as the project grows more complex. Thanks for sharing.

Symfony has a huge lot of magic (text/non-typed config files, factory/abstract bloats, ...), and even dark magic (compilation passes, ...), but it's better than Laravel in many ways indeed.

A simpler framework with modern techniques would be great though.

Too much angst about non standards and preferences. Everyone codes the way they feel comfortable and decides what to implement because the more mumbojumbo pattern magic included the more complexity you introduce to your codebase. And the development time skyrockets.

Just because someone wrote a book about patterns, it doesn't mean it's the high standard and the holy bible by any means. These people are mostly control freaks, who like to exert control on people and think their excrement is akin to a lump of gold.

And then there are the preachers - like you - who disseminate the bullshit these pattern monkeys rant day and night.

We are in agreement about Laravel's ORM, but I disagree about the magic. Laravel's "magic" is just convention over configuration, and most things can be configured as well.

But really, who thought mixins was a good idea? It's the only place in the wild I've seen somebody bind $this when calling closures.

What do you think of Slim Framework as far as best practices for modern PHP in a micro framework (which is similar to OP's Dumbo)? Are there any other micro frameworks you recommend?

https://www.slimframework.com/

At the risk of being piled on by fans of Slim (see fans of Laravel), I don't use slim frameworks.

For large projects when you get down to it, slim frameworks are simply frameworks where you have to add in components yourself, vs shipping with sane defaults.

Symfony comes with Doctrine, Twig, etc, but you can choose not to use them or even include them.

With slim frameworks if they are built correctly they will have hooks to add these components but you have to choose them and import them and set them up.

I have not worked on a small project in years, and have not bothered looking at slim frameworks in as much time, so my knowledge might be out of date ... but a quick glance through Slim's documentation tells me I'm still fairly close.

I'll add on to this too, as someone who largely agrees!

I work for a company that has several mid-sized PHP projects. Some started life back with early PHP5 - eg 5.1.

The biggest reason I don't like slim frameworks is that they make every project unique.

Projects that start small rarely stay small, and if every project gets to pick it's own router, it's own method of doing CLI commands, it's own ORM, it's own messaging/queue stack, etc - then well intentioned decisions create a ton of variety in projects over time and it makes it very hard for people to jump from project to project. It also makes upgrades a mammoth task.

We tested Slim, Laravel & Symfony and settled on Symfony.

We found huge advantages in using a framework that can be installed piece-by-piece as you need it, but where the pieces are the same every time & consistently designed, and where the whole thing is designed to be upgraded in one go.

Going with Symfony has been a genuine productivity improvement for us - every project follows the same basic structure, we try to follow Symfony best practices, we try to minimise tons of external dependencies. It makes maintenance much much easier, and makes something like 'hey, we really should be processing this async in the background' an easy step - just install symfony/messenger, rather than evaluating different options, etc.

edit: we didn't go for Laravel because Eloquent really didn't compare well to Doctrine, and the amount of hard to debug 'magic' was much worse for us than Symfony.