More than half of developers prefer Phpstorm as their primary PHP development editor for web applications, a survey suggests.
That’s according to developer tools company JetBrains, which released its State of Laravel 2024 survey results in September. with Phpstorm an integrated development environment (IDE) for PHP developers by JetBrains.
“Phpstorm has been the most popular choice for ages, and in this iteration of the survey it was favored by 54.01% of respondents,” said Tania Goral, writing on the JetBrains blog.
“This IDE, enhanced by the Laravel Idea plugin, offers a comprehensive feature set specifically tailored for Laravel development.”
PHP development is for general purpose scripting. The language has continued to be popular.
Laravel is a PHP development framework for web applications. Its regular updates and new features keep Laravel “at the cutting edge” of PHP development, she added.
Meanwhile, Visual Studio Code (VS Code) was the second most popular editor. Some 40.24% of respondents voted for VS Code, with Sublime Text third, with just 2.18% of the vote, Goral wrote.
Goral also highlighted the widespread adoption of newer Laravel versions for the latest improvements and features, such as good integration capabilities from APIs and third-party services to complex database architectures.
Pros and cons of Laravel for PHP development
“Laravel’s own tools for the ecosystem like Laravel Forge (for server management), Laravel Vapor (for serverless deployment on AWS), and Laravel Nova (an administration panel for Laravel applications) are gaining traction,” JetBrains‘ Goral wrote.
“These tools simplify many aspects of development, deployment, and maintenance, allowing developers to focus more on coding and less on infrastructure management.”
However, Laravel migrations could be “challenging”, particularly for larger or more complex applications, so many devs have remained on earlier versions, she added.
Most respondents (95%) reported using Laravel for business applications and 58% for hobby projects, she said.
The survey attracted 4,090 respondents worldwide. Nearly half hailed from Europe and about 20% from Asia. Most respondents were developers with 10–20 years of overall experience and 5–10 years of experience with Laravel, according to Goral.
