Laravel is the king of PHP frameworks and spans the widths and depths of large scale web application development. Laravel is built to be simple, easy to learn and supports rapid application development. Laravel comes with its own templating enginenamed “Blade”. The best thing about blade is that it allows you to write plain PHP in the templates which essentially means that Blade brings no performance overheads to your application. Another power fact about Laravel is the inclusion of “Homestead” which is the packaged Vagarant box to let you start development without the hassles of installing web server, HHVM, PHP or any other package on your local machine or server.
Laravel team has recently released “Lumen”, a micro PHP framework for the web developers who like to build lightning fast API’s as well as Laravel based services. Laravel provides some amazing features like fast extension ability, development speed, scalability, and quick institution along with this it provides better programming results as compared to other programming tools and so it is highly preferred by the developers.
Features of Laravel :
• Intelligently designed to offer incredible flexibility to developers that help them create each and everything from small sites to giant enterprise applications.
• Inherent Database Version control.
• A lightweight Blade Templating Engine.
• Composer – An amazing tool that lets you manage your application’s third-party packages easily.
• Built-in unit testing and simply readable impressive syntax.
• Restful routing.
• The paginate method provided by Laravel automatically takes care of setting the proper limit and offset based on the current page being viewed by the user.
• Laravel is famous with its fluent query builder is supported by Eloquent which is an advanced PHP implementation that allows enforcing constraints between multiple database objects.
• Laravel has an auto-loading facility which delivers automated loading of PHP classes that doesn’t need any manual maintenance and inclusion paths.
Benefits of Laravel :
• Template engine : Laravel framework has in-built lightweight templates with which one can create amazing layouts with dynamic content seeding. It has many widgets including JS and CSS code with solid structures. The templates of these frameworks are designed to build a simple layout with different sections.
• Eloquent ORM (object-relational mapping) : Laravel provides the Eloquent ORM which includes a simple PHP ActiveRecord implementation which lets the developer issue database queries with PHP syntax instead of writing SQL code. Every table in the database possesses a corresponding Model through which the developer interacts with said table. An ORM is relatively faster than all other PHP frameworks.
• Libraries : It has Object Oriented libraries and many other pre-installed libraries, which are not found in any other popular PHP frameworks. One of the pre – installed library is an Authentication library.
• Modular : Laravel framework is built on more than 20 different libraries and is itself divided into individual modules. It adopts modern PHP principles, which allows developers to build modular, responsive and handy web apps.
• Security : Laravel takes care of the security within its framework. It uses salted and hashed password, which means that the password would never save as the plain text in database. It uses Bcrypt hashing algorithm for generating encrypted representation of a password. Laravel uses prepared SQL statements which make injection attacks unimaginable.
• MVC Architecture Support : Laravel follows the MVC pattern, ensuring clarity between logic and presentation. This architecture helps in improving the performance, allows better documentation, and has multiple built-in functions.
• Unit-Testing : Many programmers like Laravel due to the way it facilitates Unit testing. It runs hundreds of tests to ensure that new changes done by developers don’t unexpectedly break anything in the application. Laravel is generally considered to have some of the most stable releases in the industry as it is careful of the known failures. It also makes it easy to write unit-tests for own code.