Among the most popular PHP development frameworks is Laravel. Let's take a closer look.

Picking the right framework for your application is one of the most challenging parts of developing it. When choosing a framework, a development team ought to consider several factors, such as the cost, the experience of the team, the popularity, and so forth. Integrations with third parties, deployments, and testing, are some other factors to consider.

There are many great PHP MVC frameworks, but Laravel ranks at the top among them, ahead of Symfony, CodeIgniter, Yii 2, Phalcon, CakePHP, Zend, Slim, and Yii2.

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PHP Frameworks

Laravel's popularity has increased over the last five years compared to other PHP frameworks. In 2018, Laravel is definitely the best framework.

Laravel is one of the most popular repositories on GitHub with almost 45000 stars (and counting).

How does it become so popular? Is it possible to use it to create all kinds of web applications?

This blog goes into great detail on what Laravel is and why it's so popular, and why it's still the leading PHP framework today.

What is Laravel?

Laravel is an alternative PHP web framework to CodeIgniter developed by Taylor Otwell. The framework was heavily influenced by Symfony from an architectural standpoint.

Enhanced features in version 3 of the framework, such as database support, migrations, and the Artisan command-line interface, led to increased popularity. A package system was added as well.

The first stable version of Laravel was released in June 2011. The stable versions 5.6 and 5.7 were released in February and September, respectively.

Why Laravel?

In this article, we will explain why Laravel is gaining so much popularity by detailing some of its interesting features.

Laravel – PHP Framework

1. Support for Object-Oriented Design and MVC

This framework complements the Model, View, and Controller architecture pattern as well as having a beautifully expressive syntax which makes it object-oriented.

2. Authentication and authorization built-in

By default, Laravel provides a complete authentication and authorization solution. Authentication and authorization will be performed by your application with only a few artisan commands.

3. Packing System

Web applications automate their processes with the help of packaging systems that manage various programs or libraries. Laravel manages its dependencies via a composer as part of its package management process. Since packages are preconfigured with the functionality we require, they can dramatically accelerate development. IDE helper and debug bar are two of the best Laravel packages.

4. Having multiple partitions in a file system

In addition to local storage, Laravel also supports cloud storage, such as Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloud Storage. Switching between the two systems is extremely simple because they both use the same API. All three systems can be combined into one application to create a distributed environment.

5. Artisan Console

In Laravel, this feature is called Artisan. In addition to managing database migrations, publishing package assets, and seeding and generating boilerplate code, Artisan can generate code for new controllers, models, and migrations. With these functions, developers don't have to create skeletons from scratch, resulting in better code. Custom commands can make Artisan stronger and more functional.

6. A powerful ORM

Eloquent is the name of the built-in ORM in Laravel. Comparing Laravel to other frameworks, it has the best object-relational mapping. It allows you to express your relationships and objects in a formal, expressive manner.

7. Template engine

The blade is a built-in template engine in Laravel. By converting templates into cached PHP code, a Blade template engine converts templates and data models into a view. PHP internalizes Blade's control structures in addition to conditional statements and loops.

8. Scheduling tasks

The Artisan command-line utility allows for programmatic scheduling of periodically performed tasks with Laravel 5.0's Scheduler. Using the cron daemon, Artist runs all configured tasks via an Artisan job.

9. Events and broadcasting

Using Laravel's broadcasting feature, you can display real-time data, show live feeds, etc. on modern web applications. You can share the same event name between your client and server to retrieve real-time data from your application using broadcasting.

10. Testing

Laravel automatically includes tests to aid in detecting and preventing regressions as part of the default installation. Unit testing frameworks for PHP can be easily integrated with Laravel applications. Unit tests can also be run with the artisan command-line utility.

Along with these features, Laravel also lets you easily integrate packages into your application.

Official packages

1. Among other features, Laravel 4.2's Stripe interface manages billing for subscriptions and generates invoices.

2. In Laravel 5.0, Socialite allows you to quickly authenticate with social networks such as Google and Facebook as well as GitHub, Twitter, and Bitbucket. Utilizing Envoy's minimal syntax, you can automate common tasks. Hence, you can efficiently manage these social logins in your application. When using the Blade template syntax, you can easily configure deployment tasks, Artisans commands, and more.

3. Monitoring the queue of your system is made easier with its beautiful dashboard and code-driven configuration. The main objective of Horizon is to manage output, execution time, and errors.

4. OAuth servers authenticate API users with their passports since API does not maintain an HTTP session state. For web applications, Laravel passport provides a complete OAuth server implementation within minutes using the token as the authentication method.

5. Scout uses Eloquent models to provide out-of-the-box full-text search right in Laravel. By selecting another driver from the list, you can create a custom driver instead of using the default one. This is a simple process that enhances the searching capability.

These features are included with Laravel out-of-the-box, so it is well suited to the development of small as well as enterprise web applications. Developers also have access to several built-in functionalities. Laravel's official packages round out the package offering.

Do you need expert advice on your next Laravel project? Contact Laravel Development Company for more details.

Orion InfoSolutions Member since July 13, 2020