DEV Community

Kenny Barrera
Kenny Barrera

Posted on

Honest question: Why hasn't Laravel Nova/Filament been used by almost everyone?

People, stay with me on this one.

I know PHP died 10 years ago, and I know what you're thinking, and I know what is going on right now in your crazy, amazing, and tired dev mind, and Taylor who? And no, please no. This is a real, honest, and legitimate question.

Nova/Filament is an administration panel built on top of Laravel. That means you install Laravel (very easy using Sail), install Nova/Filament, run a couple of migrations and commands for creating resources and you have a production-ready admin panel for your data. It literally feels like magic.

Until you try it, you don't actually understand how easy it is to have nothing, then you just run one command, and then you have a menu option, a table for all your entries (with a search input that works), and forms for both creating and editing items that work and save data (after you run the migration and create the model). The front end with all the css and interactions is done, the backend is done, and everything is done. Wait, what?

With Nova 4 and Filament 3, the customization it's so, that you can pretty much create anything you want, not just admin panels. You can even implement different code architectures, use awesome coding practices like SOLID, use DDD or TDD, anything, really. I've done it, I've coded myself.

Even my man Taylor (the great and only Otwell) in a recent event said Livewire will be adopted and maintained by Laravel, which is great! and of course, they will continue working on Nova. That makes both solutions even better!

Now, stop it with the Nova/Filament love. In these past days I've been thinking about this: Even though PHP is supposedly dead, we can't deny that the idea is brilliant. So, where are the Nova/Filament copies? In another backend tech? .Net, Java, Python, Ruby? I did a hard search on Google, and nothing, zero, nada. I'm no expert, but all of these are object-oriented, MVC can be implemented I think in all of them, I know there is a package manager for Django and Rails projects (not really sure about the others), there are millions of devs and strong communities behind them, and yet nothing. even. close.

Almost every small and medium-sized business could probably hire a Laravel contractor/small agency, ask for an admin panel or small app, and it could potentially be ready in a couple or few months, depending on the complexity. I'm already doing that for small businesses. Sure, staff/senior and very skilled devs can build anything in that same timeframe with other frameworks and languages, but it's expensive.

So here I am, asking myself why? It only makes sense in my mind that everyone, or almost everyone should be using one of these two solutions to build admin panels or web apps that work perfectly for this situation.

This is my first post, so easy on the comments. But at the end, why?

Top comments (1)

Collapse
 
fyodorio profile image
Fyodor

The answer is obvious: because you do you ๐Ÿคทโ€โ™‚๏ธ who cares