In the first episode of the PHP Town Hall podcast, Phil Sturgeon and Ben Edmunds rant about how awesome Composer is; chat with Taylor Otwell about the upcoming Laravel 4 release; and whine about how horrible PHP PAAS hosting is.

You can listen to this podcast either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 for listening offline or by subscribing to their feed.

In this edition I talked with Taylor Otwell {@taylorotwell}, the man behind Laravel (created in April of 2011) which is a PHP 5.3+ Framework. Taylor is a .NET developer who specializes in elegant, intuitive software. The fact that he comes from a .NET background and he produces such an excellent, solid PHP framework with good standards, is something very inspiring and amazing. His framework, Laravel is very unique in itself and has an awesome community behind; Laravel is getting a lot of momentum and is on its way to being one (or is already?) of the most awesome PHP 5.3 framework.

Some of Taylor's answers cover things like:

• His advice to budding PHP developers
• His admiration for Fabien Potencier
• His work in .NET as a "day job"
• Details about the Laravel framework (and trials along the road to its development)

You can read the full interview here.