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But Laravel contains much more; it was for example the fastest framework to use, since Laravel made excellent use of
caching. Even though Laravel is quite new, it already has an active user base and it makes good use of powerful and tested
third party libraries without having to reinvent the wheel and rewriting something which already exists. Because of major
points like these Laravel was voted as the best PHP framework (see figure 8).

Figure 8: popularity of Laravel compared to other frameworks

4.2.4 Problems

Needless to say, I did run into some problems while working on the main design. I was very nervous in the beginning. I was
afraid I was too naïve to think I could learn about a framework, and then create a whole project from scratch. I didn’t
believe I would be able to learn about Laravel on time and implement it into my project. All kinds of ‘what ifs’ were going
through my head. This brought me a bit down. Thankfully Andrej (my company mentor) noticed this, and told me about
how he started with the framework. He told me to read the documentation and work through some of the examples, and
as he put it “just start somewhere, begin small and extend it”. This gave me the push I needed and I began reading a lot
about it and go through the documentation to get a clear idea.

It worked out quite well. It was still a bit of struggling reading the documentation and trying small parts out. But by using
the library strategy combined with workshop and lab strategy, I managed to teach myself quite a lot about the workings of
Laravel. Reading, coding, testing and repeat! I also found it very helpful to ask some of the other people at the office about
how some parts of Laravel worked, or how I had to make a function in Laravel. Everyone was very glad to help me out, and
this really gave me the feeling that I shouldn’t be afraid to ask questions. With my answered questions and the
documentation of Laravel I got a good hold of Laravel, and before I knew it I didn’t even need to look up the
documentation anymore to write the codes.