Previous article updated with new information... contninue reading here.

The Present

I am slowly preparing to refactor some ancient PHP code and have recently been toying with Laravel--a PHP framework for "web artisans"--to see how it compares to other frameworks out there. It has been a pleasant experience so far but there's a new version, Laravel 4, around the corner that looks like an ideal candidate for my PHP framework of choice. I haven't spent much time with it but one major improvement over the current version that I really appreciate has to do with how easy it is to add/maintain third-party code.

Modularity seems to have always been at the core of Laravel and is currently implemented through the grouping of external code into so-called that can have their own views, configuration, routes, migrations, tasks, etc. That's great but there's one major problem: bundles are isolated from the rest of the PHP community, thus limiting not only Laravels' extensibility but also discouraging code re-use and collaboration.

The Future

Laravel 4 takes its modular design a step (or, rather, a jump) further and seamlessly integrates with Composer, which is a powerful PHP packaging system that makes code sharing and dependency management a hassle-free experience. Each module in Laravel is a Composer package. Updating core modules, adding and maintaining third-party libraries will become a matter of few clicks/commands. I will quickly demonstrate it by installing HybridAuth, a PHP library for authentication through social networks.

...contninue reading here.