Why Crowdcube chose the Laravel PHP Framework to power their large-scale web application, and how they use it as part of a multi-disciplinary team

1. Why Choose
Laravel?

2. "Always start your
presentation with a quote"
1
@rosstuck

3. Why Choose Laravel?
1. Introduction
2. The Problems of Legacy Code
3. Introducing Laravel
4. Laravel in Action

4. 1. Introduction

5. Who are you John?

6. John Blackmore
4 31 Years Old
4 Married with 2 Children
4 14 Years Experience in Web
4 Technical Architect at
Crowdcube

7. The Architect

8. What is
Crowdcube?

9. 4 Equity Crowdfunding Platform
4 £40m Invested, 90k Investors, 150 Pitches
4 Self funded on our own platform, three times.

10. 2. The Problems
of Legacy Code

11. Legacy Code Problems
4 Spaghetti code
4 Limited code re-use
4 Multiple code styles
4 Security vulnerabilities

12. The Solution?

13. Our Solution at Crowdcube
4 Develop new features on a framework
4 Agreed coding style (modified PSR-2)
4 Best practises (SoC, DRY, SOLID)
4 Git with Git-Flow

14. What is a Framework?

15. Framework
an essential supporting structure of
a building, vehicle, or object.
a basic structure underlying
a system, concept, or text

16. Software Framework
an abstraction in which software providing generic
functionality can be selectively changed by additional user-written
code, thus providing application-specific software

17. say what?

18. A software framework is
80% of your application
already written for you.

19. Why use a framework?
4 Enables rapid development
4 Stable and well tested
4 Community support
4 Easy to recruit developers

20. Hey, I could build
my own framework?

21. Bad Idea
In most cases

22. Why you should not build your own
4 You don't have time
4 There will be bugs
4 Difficult to recruit developers
4 Why reinvent the wheel?

23. Framework Options

25. 3. Introducing Laravel

26. Laravel Features
4 MVC Framework
4 Convention over Configuration
4 Coded to Interfaces:
4 Authentication, Databases, Caching, Queueing
4 Blade templating engine

27. Why Crowdcube Chose Laravel
4 Low learning curve
4 Well documented
4 Excellent test coverage
4 Large active community
4 Built on Symfony components

28. You can use Laravel
features right now

29. Standalone Components
4 Illuminate - https://github.com/illuminate
4 Can be used within non-laravel projects
4 Crowdcube actively uses:
4 illuminate/database
4 illuminate/events
4 illuminate/queue

30. 4. Laravel in Action
Examples from Crowdcube

31. Legacy Crowdcube Platform
4 Single LAMP server
4 Procedural PHP4 code
4 Tightly coupled to MySQL
4 No caching

32. Where do you start?

33. Problem
Server load was extremely peaky
Cause: serving static assets from
the application server

34. Solution: Amazon Cloudfront CDN
4 Cloudfront sits in front of existing server
http://www.crowdcube.com/images/some_image.jpg
http://cdn.crowdcube.com/images/some_image.jpg
4 80% reduction in CPU usage

35. Problem
Existing Database Schema

36. Solution: Eloquent Models
4 Eloquent maps database tables to PHP models
class Pitches extends Eloquent {}
Pitches::whereTitle('Crowdcube'); // returns Crowdcube pitch
4 CRUD operations now simplified in code
$user = User::create(['name'=>'John', 'email'=>'john@crowdcube.com']);
$user->save(); // This can trigger additional events
INSERT INTO `users` (name, email) VALUES ('John', 'john@crowdcube.com');

37. Problem
Talking between legacy code
and Laravel code

38. Solution: Eventing and Worker Queues
4 Amazon SQS Queues
4 Events fired in legacy code
Event::fire('pitch.funded', ['pitch'=>'1234']);
4 Events captured, jobs queued
Queue::push('SendFundedEmail', ['pitch' => '1234'])
4 Queues processed in Laravel

39. Problem
Visible lag on some pages
e.g. home page, search
Cause: Slow SQL queries

40. Solution: Query Caching
$activePitches = Cache::remember('pitches.active', 10, function()
{
return Pitches::active()->get();
});
4 Supports APC, Memcached, Redis out the box
4 Typical search query ~400ms from MySQL
4 Same query using file driver <10ms

41. Problem
Not enough time to talk about
all the really cool stuff

42. Other Cool Stuff
4 Query Scoping
4 View Composers
4 Model Binding
4 Artisan CLI
4 Homestead / Forge

43. Laravel Resources
4 Official Docs - http://laravel.com/docs
4 Laracasts - https://laracasts.com
4 Code Bright - https://leanpub.com/codebright
4 Culttt (Philip Brown) - http://culttt.com

44. Unless someone like you
cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get
better. It’s not.
1
The Lorax

45. Questions?

46. Thank You!
Twitter: @johnblackmore
Email: john@crowdcube.com
Feedback: http://lanyrd.com/sdfcyt