Friendly Show
Yaro and Adrian are online and conference buddies that enjoy speaking about development, tech, SaaS, and product development.
Let's be friends!
Friendly Show
Taylor Otwell: How Rails inspired Laravel 🚀 Live from Rails World 2024!
Ever wondered how one of the most popular PHP frameworks came to be? We've got you covered with an exclusive conversation with Taylor Otwell, the mastermind behind Laravel, recorded live at Rails World 2024. Taylor takes us on a fascinating journey from Laravel’s early days, inspired heavily by Rails, to its unique path with game-changing innovations like InertiaJS and Laravel Livewire. We discuss the evolution of Laravel's ORM, routing systems, and its impressive event-based system, job queues, and real-time functionalities. Taylor also shares his excitement about Rails 8's innovative approach to using databases by default, a philosophy mirrored in Laravel 11. This episode is packed with insights that highlight the mutual inspirations and differences between Laravel and Rails, all aimed at enhancing developer productivity and ease of use.
But that's not all—Taylor gives us an exciting glimpse into the future of Laravel. He shares his anticipation for Laracon Australia in Brisbane, where a groundbreaking new product will be unveiled. We also get the scoop on the highly awaited release of Laravel Cloud, expected to roll out later this year or early next year. Looking ahead to 2025, Taylor teases additional projects set to launch in the spring, keeping us on the edge of our seats. Wrapping up, Taylor expresses heartfelt gratitude and leaves us with a powerful message to keep innovating. This episode is a treasure trove for anyone keen on the future of Laravel and the ongoing evolution of web development frameworks.
Hey everyone. This is Adrian from the Friendly Show we're at Rails World 2024, and with me is Taylor Otwell, the author of Laravel. It's great to have you here, taylor.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:So for the folks who haven't heard about Laravel, if that's even possible, it's a full-stack MVC PHP framework similar to Rails. Is that a correct description? Similar to.
Speaker 2:Rails inspired by Rails to some extent. You know, I always felt like we were kind of standing on a Rails shoulders as we were building Laravel. I was always consulting the Rails docs and like how does Rails do things you know and using that for inspiration. So, yeah, it's good to be here at my first Ruby on Rails conference.
Speaker 1:actually, oh, that's awesome. That's awesome, it's almost in your backyard, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, pretty much yeah.
Speaker 1:Awesome. So for the people who a few people really know that I actually started out as a PHP developer and Laravel was one of the first application app frameworks that I used. And at some point I got a job at a place where they did Rails and I almost you know, and I almost automatically slid in. So in a way, laravel brought me into Rails because it was really really easy to just get into it. So my first question was how much did Rails inspire you to do it? Was it something like hey, I love that Rails. You know, I love what Rails is and you know, I know how DHH does things and I want to be kind of, you know, stepping on, like you know, dhh's trail.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean to a large extent. Yes, rails was a really big inspiration for Laravel, probably like the singular biggest inspiration. I took a lot of ideas from a lot of different frameworks. I think Rails would be considered kind of the primary one and you see that a lot in Laravel, where you see it probably most in like the ORM. You know it feels very much like Active Record.
Speaker 1:For sure.
Speaker 2:It follows like the Active Record design pattern of building ORMs, the controllers, the views, the routing it all feels like pretty familiar if you've built a Ruby on Rails app, I think so yeah, but I mean, and even beyond the code, I think just like the overall philosophy of being a really productive full stack framework, kind of like DHH said still this morning, where one person can sit down with a framework and build a complete application like that's you know, their own idea, their own business and launch it out into the world, I think that's actually just a really powerful concept and really inspiring. So that was also just a big piece of kind of what I drew from Ruby on Rails was that overall philosophy.
Speaker 1:Awesome, that sounds great. Well, me following you along, because I was a Laravel 3 user. When we used underscores for method names, I noticed it was kind of like you wanted to reach where Rails is, but at some point to me it seemed like you figured out. It's okay, we're Laravel, we'll do things a little bit different and you kind of went your separate way, because there are some patterns that are quite different. Can you like pinpoint, kind of like that's that place in time, or like inversion?
Speaker 2:yeah, you know, I would say like it would probably be around like the laravel 4 time period, which is probably, like I don't know, 2015, 2016 or something like that where you know laravel had matured to a certain extent and started, we started forming some of our own opinions. I think you see that a little bit more on the front end side of things.
Speaker 2:So, tools like InertiaJS, tools like Laravel, livewire, which was eventually released in like 2019. That, I think, are pretty different than the way front end has typically been done in Rails, so that's one area where they kind of diverged, but while still trying to maintain the overall philosophy of just like rapid iteration, shipping quickly being super productive. Yeah, but we did kind of come into our own, you know, and try to build out some of our own ideas as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah for sure. So I remember at some point I went back from Rails to Laravel and the event-based system. That was something cool where you have events and listeners Right. That's kind of a little bit different from what Rails does.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, events are a pretty popular feature in Laravel. We had job queues for a long time in Laravel and now we've even gone down similar things to Rails with, like Rails has action cable. We've now launched Laravel Reverb to do, you know, real time stuff. So we've followed a lot of similar paths and sometimes the implementations look somewhat similar, sometimes different, but yeah, it's been a fun journey.
Speaker 1:Awesome. What was so after watching the keynote? What's something that inspired you?
Speaker 2:Well, one thing I actually really love about Rails 8, and this may have started in Rails 7, is this getting back to just like the database as being the default sort of backend for cache, queues, sessions and now I guess even real-time stuff with action cable having a database sort of adapter. I actually really agree with that. That's something we also did in Laravel with the most recent Laravel 11 release is database is like the default driver and, just like David said this morning, it's just like one less thing you have to have in your stack. If you don't have to have like Redis or even like MySQL or Postgres, just have SQLite as a file. I think that's actually a really awesome getting started point for getting new people onto the framework because they don't need to install any other software on their machine. So I'm also I share David's excitement about that, for sure that's awesome.
Speaker 1:Is it an overstatement if we say Laravel goes SQLite?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean we've gone full SQLite by default. So if you start a new Laravel application today, it's using SQLite. That's what the standard configuration is, and of course, you can switch it to MySQL or Postgres or even SQL Server. But yeah, SQLite is the default in Laravel 11, which came out back in February.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Tell me what do you think about Rails World, the attendees, the venue oh it's great.
Speaker 2:I mean it's an amazing venue. I'm always blown away how fast Rails World has been selling out of tickets. We sell out at Laracon but it takes a few months for us to sell all the tickets. But it's like Rails World you have to be ready to like buy your ticket the first day those things go on sale or you're going to miss out, which I think is actually. I mean, I think the Rails community should be super excited about that, because there's just a lot of demand for Rails events apparently. So I mean, I think that's a good sign for the health of the ecosystem overall and I think Rails world is sort of a great opportunity for a very mature, established ecosystem to kind of get like fresh energy. I think Rails probably wanted that and needed that to some extent, and it feels like that's kind of happening here.
Speaker 1:Awesome, thanks for saying that. So here at the Friendly Show we try to capture a little bit of the human side of our guests, not only the techie side. So I would like to ask what's your ideal vacation? Look like so.
Speaker 2:I've had a few different vacations that I really like, like my wife and I and my kids. If we go on vacation we like to just like go to different cities and we'll usually stop at like three different cities. So, like this year, we went to Vienna, salzburg and Munich kind of all in one trip.
Speaker 2:And it was super cool getting to see everything. If it's just my wife and I, a lot of times we'll go somewhere really warm and just sit by the beach or by the pool for like a week and, just you know, have good food and relax. So there's a couple of different styles of vacations we like, but that's what we've done recently, that's awesome.
Speaker 1:The big question do you bring your laptop with you?
Speaker 2:I always bring my laptop. Yeah, you know. You know how it is. It's open source, like sometimes you got to get on. So I've always brought my laptop. But we'll see. I'm trying to get Laravel to a point where maybe next year I can take a vacation and everything will keep running smoothly. Prs will get handled, because I still spend every morning actually handling PRs on the framework directly. But we'll get there. We're working on it, that's awesome, not about vacations.
Speaker 1:when are you most productive? Is it the mornings, or are you like a night owl?
Speaker 2:I would say these days some of the most productive times I have are like weekend nights. So like a Sunday night, no one's messaging me, there's nothing going on. I can really just get on my laptop and work with no distractions. That's super productive for me, yeah. So like just a couple weeks ago on a Sunday night, I crushed through so many GitHub PRs and stuff just because nothing else was going on. You know, social media is quiet, everything's quiet.
Speaker 1:Awesome, I'm the same, I'm the same. So in my eight-hour flight here I had like eight PRs ready.
Speaker 2:Yeah, flights. Flights are so productive for me, just like walk in yeah.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Before we conclude, I know that you like to tease folks with secret projects that you're building. Are you working on something cool for 2025?
Speaker 2:We have more stuff coming in 2024. So, like the beginning of November, I go to Laracon Australia. It's in Brisbane. This year we're actually showing an entirely new product there. So at Laracon US we showed Larabel Cloud, which is sort of one of the big things we've been working on that we hope to release you know, later this year, early next year.
Speaker 2:We actually have a whole nother product that we haven't even revealed yet and we're going to do the first public unveil of that at Laracon, Australia, just in, you know, I guess five or six weeks from now. So, yeah, that's what's up next. And then 2025, we do have stuff planned Probably into the spring. You know we'll get into some of that stuff.
Speaker 1:Gotcha, Gotcha Sounds great Cool. Thank you so much, Taylor for being here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:And keep on doing it All right, yeah, will do.
