Laravel and Spring Boot in 2025

I recently realized I can use JetBrains’ Educational Pack 🎓 — so why not download all the IDEs and play around?

It’s been years since I last touched Spring Boot (back in my Qunar days), and I haven’t had a Java project in ages. But I heard it now supports Kotlin, so I gave it a try.
A quick visit to Spring Initializr, select Spring Web, and boom — project template ready. Add a controller, use @GetMapping for the endpoint, and you’ve got yourself a REST server. 🚀

Laravel, on the other hand, reminded me just how ridiculously easy PHP frameworks can be. The starter template even comes with user authentication right out of the box. Brilliant!