About
I had a project that I was working on that involved taking a humungous spreadsheet, that
became an Access database, and make it into a relational database that would allow for the data to be
cleaned up. The end result came out pretty good, we built a desktop application to get quick reads and writes
to the data. After the desktop application was complete, we needed a couple of Crystal Reports to present the
data in a comprehensive manner. We didn't really know how bad or incomplete the data was without having a
few reports to shed some light on it.
The extent of the data is very large, it is more than one person can handle. So in order to help out the data
coordinator, we created a web application that would allow for "trusted users" to submit changes to the data. The submissions
were placed in a queue for review and the data coordinator could review them before they became part of the inventory.
As part of the project we also needed a public web site, that would present the data in its cleaned up form. At this point
we discovered that we were getting a lot of traffic, and more than half of the traffic was from a mobile device of some kind.
We needed a mobile friendly page.
I looked around for the best way to do this, and what I found was the MVC pattern. The MVC pattern was established way
before the world wide web, but the pattern fit nicely for web development. One of Microsoft's finest developers
constructed the ASP.Net MVC pattern in the duration of a flight, which was a couple of hours. The pattern is
very useful. I have worked with contract employees who were absolutely thrilled that MVC was an option to classic ASP and
ASP.Net web forms.
Laravel is PHP's flavor of the MVC pattern, and along with MVC you get an ORM that supports multiple database technologies.
I will be honest it is not as powerfull as Microsoft's Entity Framework, nor is it as good as LINQ-to-SQL, but by-golly
it's an ORM for Mysql and PHP. I am a huge fan, and the Composer makes Laravel easy to install and keep up to date with
a growing stack.
Try it, you'll love it.