PHP is the most widely used web development language. Laravel is its most well-known framework. We will discuss the reasons in this article.
The most challenging aspect of project development is choosing the right framework. While the main criteria for a developer team to select the framework is the cost of development, their experience using it, and popularity of the framework, there are many other factors such as deployment, testing, third-party integrations, and many others that should be carefully considered.
There are many PHP scripting languages that offer robust technical capabilities, such as Symfony CodeIgniter Yii 2, Phalcon CakePHP, Zend and Slim. Laravel is still the most popular PHP MVC framework.
Laravel is also one the most popular repositories on GitHub with nearly 45000 stars (and counting).
What is the secret to such popularity? And how can it be used to cover all your web applications needs?
Let's take a deeper dive into Laravel and the reasons why it remains the most popular PHP framework.
What is Laravel?
was developed by Taylor Otwell to offer a more sophisticated alternative to the codeIgniterframework. Its architecture patterns are largely based on .
The release of version 3 brought more attention to the framework, which introduced features such as the Command Line Interface called Artisan and Support for the Database system. Bundles was also introduced.
Laravel's initial stable version was released June 2011. Laravel's first stable version, 5.6, was published in June 2011. Version 5.7 was released in September 2018. Version 5.8 was released February 2019. Version 7 and 9 were released in March 2020. Laravel Developers are also among the most in-demand category of developers.
Why Laravel?
We'll be highlighting some of the unique features of Laravel Framework here. This will help you understand why it is so popular.
There are many top Laravel development firms that provide amazing services, and have a team full of experienced Laravel developers.
1. MVC Support and Object-Oriented Approach
Laravel Framework has the best advantages: It follows Model, View and Controller-based architectural patterns and it has expressive beautiful syntax that makes it object-oriented.
2. Built-In Authorization and Authentication
Laravel offers an out-of the-box configuration of the Authentication and Authorization systems. This means that your application can be set up with secure Authorization and Authentication in just a few commands.
3. Packaging System
A packaging system is a collection of support software and libraries that allow the web application to automate certain tasks. Laravel uses composer as a dependency manager. This manages all information about packages. Packages can be a great way of speeding development. They provide the functionality that we need right out of the box. Image: Laravel Debug Bar and Laravel IDEA helper are two of the most popular Laravel packages.
4.Multiple File System
Laravel has built-in support to the cloud storage systems such as Amazon S3 or Rack space Cloud Storage, and also for local storage. As the API is the same for all storage options, switching between them is easy. To serve files from multiple locations, such as in a distributed environment, one can use all three storage systems in the same application.
5. Artisan Console
Laravel comes with its own command-line interface, Artisan. Artisan is used to publish package assets, manage database migrations, seeding, and generate boilerplate code for new models, controllers, and migrations. This feature allows the developer to create code skeletons without having to do any programming. You can add new commands to Artisan to extend its functionality and capabilities.
6. Eloquent ORM
Laravel's Eloquent ORM implements the ORM. Laravel's Object-relational Mapper is superior to all other frameworks. This Object-relational map allows you to interact directly with your database objects.
7. Templating engine
Blade Template Engine is an inbuilt template engine that Laravel has. The Blade template engine is able to combine one or more templates with data models to create views. It then caches the PHP code and transforms them into a cached PHP code. Blade provides its own control structures, such as loops and conditional statements, that are internally mapped with their PHP counterparts.
8.Task Scheduling
Laravel 5.0 introduced Scheduler. It is an extension to the Artisan command line utility that allows programmatic scheduling for periodically executed tasks. Scheduler internally relies on the cron to run one Artisan job which executes the tasks.
9. Broadcasting and Events
Broadcasting is a Laravel concept that allows you to use real-time data in modern web applications. Live feeds can be shown, etc. Broadcasting allows you share the same event name between your client-side and server-side so that you can pull real-time data from your application.
10. Test
Laravel defaults to providing the unit test for an application when testing it. This contains tests that detect and stop regressions in the framework. Laravel makes it easy to integrate PHP unit, such as a framework for testing. You can also run unit tests through the provided artisan command line utility.
These features are not the only ones Laravel offers. Laravel also offers official packages that can be used to integrate different features into the application.
Top comments (1)
I really miss CodeIgniter
Wrote my first commercial websites in it and loved it's simplicity of data access. But the world moved on...
I find Eloquent really hard to get on with. I don't like ORMs as the best of times and I simply don't get the facade pattern.