Laravel or Spring Boot? 3 Key Reasons to Choose Laravel

Over the past year, I've been immersed in learning and building projects with Spring Boot. Its robustness is a significant advantage, particularly when developing scalable applications. However, this same robustness often results in complex, hard-to-maintain code, leading to unresolved bugs. As a result, Spring Boot might not be the best choice for beginners.

In this post, I will convince you, based on my experience, why Laravel is a more suitable and superior choice for your next project.

Why Laravel?

It's interesting to see more developers adopting Laravel as their main stack. One reason is the increasing interest in indie hacking, where developers want to ship applications quickly, efficiently, and profitably.

I was initially skeptical because I had the wrong idea that PHP and, therefore, Laravel were outdated technologies, but that's not the case.

Laravel has a large and active community, which ensures the framework continuously improves features and streamlines the development process. Besides its extreme ease of use, it can scale to enterprise-level applications.

So, here are three reasons why Laravel outshines Spring Boot when we are talking about modern web development:

1. Authentication And Authorization in Seconds

Laravel provides Starter Kits, like Laravel Breeze, which offer pre-built solutions for authentication and authorization, such as user registration, login, password reset, email verification, and more. These kits allow users to have a fully functional application in seconds.

Laravel also offers the flexibility to build authentication from scratch using tools like the Auth class, which provides methods for logging in, logging out, and checking authentication. Additionally, session management and password hashing are supplied out of the box.

In Spring Boot, we use Spring Security to secure applications. The main downsides here, compared to Laravel, are the overengineering necessary to implement simple security requirements and the poorly documented use cases. I remember wasting a considerable amount of time trying to figure out why my application was not working correctly, and it was just an update on the framework not present in the documentation.

2. Email Sending Made Simple

One of the main challenges with Spring Boot is handling HTML emails. Developers can send HTML as plain text or use a template engine like Thymeleaf for more complex content. So, if we want to use dynamic content inside our HTML, it requires more setup and handling, even with a template engine. In that case, the code can still become verbose, especially when handling multiple variables.

Laravel simplifies email handling with the Mailable class, which encapsulates all the functions needed to send emails. Developers can quickly send emails by following straightforward steps, such as generating the class, creating the view, and referencing it.

To send the email notification, we just call the Mailable class on the controller, passing the instance of a given class, and we have access to the properties inside the view.

3. MVC Architecture at Its Finest

While I didn't extensively use the view layer in Spring Boot, it shares the same drawbacks mentioned earlier, such as complexity and tight coupling between the controller and view layers.

Laravel removes that complexity and coupling between layers, providing the Blade template engine. Blade is a powerful yet straightforward template engine that provides valuable directives and shortcuts for everyday tasks. For example, we can use @auth, @guest, @can, and @cannot to check if a user is authenticated or has authorization to see some content on the page.

Yet, in Laravel, we can pass a model directly to the view, making it easy to populate our templates and create dynamic content.

Conclusion

Java and Spring Boot remain dominant, particularly in large, traditional industries. However, we're seeing a growing shift toward Laravel, especially in the fast-paced start-up ecosystem.

However, traditional industries could still benefit from Laravel and its robust ecosystem. With Laravel, developers can build highly scalable web applications, ensuring that they can handle any possible scenario in the future and still be performant.

From a developer's perspective, Laravel's true strength lies in its commitment to making web development enjoyable and efficient, thanks to its expressive syntax and rich built-in features.