I think that you can count Laravel as one if PHPs strengths. It is a modern, beautiful framework that took a lot of the best stuff from Ruby on Rails and ran with it. Seriously good stuff.
If I need to build an API, or want an app with backend/frontend separation, it is my go to.
Some weeks ago I had to choose a PHP framework and ended up with Laravel vs Symfony.
I started the project twice in both frameworks.
And while Laravel might be the most popular one I would say you should go with Symfony 4.
Laravel just has too much magic. When your IDE doesn't know what is going on, how will you?
But whatever the choice, skip 'annotations'! It's a bad trick that will mess up your project at one point (for example if your IDE cleans up unused usages).
Framework continues to evolve, for the better of course. With the introduction of PHP 7, I believe Laravel will get rid of magic eventually. Meanwhile, we've got tools to help ourselves.
PHP recently received an extension that exposes an asynchronous programming framework, called swoole. It's extremely promising (but not perfect). Here's the link https://www.swoole.co.uk/ and it produces some very, very, very interesting results - both in synthetic benchmarks AND real world. Link: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r17
In certain use cases, it literally annihilates Golang for example and leaves node.js way, way, way behind.
Now, ignoring the numbers, there are many things you can do using PHP:
- web applications
- background services
- queue systems
Imagination is the limit (but that applies to any language these days)
There's plenty options to choose from, from web-related frameworks to community provided libraries, even the command line interface received a ton of cool libraries to play with. I can't state that you can do X in PHP but can't do the same in Y, Y being another language. However, frameworks such as Laravel make it trivial to bootstrap a project, create an API, create a nice UI using Vue (Laravel comes with excellent Vue tooling) and deploy the whole thing in a few easy steps to popular hosting providers.
Granted, it's not language specific, there was a huge community effort behind everything PHP related: from standards, to package manager, to tooling, utilities and so on so the ecosystem is quite healthy and progressing.
The nice thing about it, ultimately, is that it's really fast enough and keeps getting faster, with new (useful) language features.
If you're after a tldr version and don't care about the wall of text above:
Async programming was there for a long time in the form of ReactPHP. With the caveat, of course, that comparatively few people know of it because of peculiarities of PHP's target audience. It's hard for something non-standard to gain traction in PHP.
Swoole looks exactly like some node.js code. The problem is that node has promises and async await while swoole/php has only callbacks right? No other mechanism..
