What is Laravel ? Why it is popular ?

Laravel is a PHP framework that will drastically improve your productivity. It has been around for quite some time. The first version was released in June of 2011, created by Taylor Otwell. It is designed to make developing web apps easier and faster through built-in features. Laravel is one of the most popular PHP framework used across the globe to build web applications ranging from small to big projects. Laravel is the choice of professional developers because of its performance, features, and scalability.

What is MVC?

MVC(Model-View-Controller) is an architectural pattern used to break down an app into three fundamental parts: data (Model), an interface to view and modify data (View) and operations that can be performed on the data (Controller).

Laravel follows MVC structure which makes it easy to learn and rapidly prototype the web applications. Laravel takes the pain out of web application development by providing built-in features like authentication, mail, routing, sessions, and the list goes on.

Features of Laravel

Some of Laravel’s most important features are as follows:

Eloquent ORM (Object-Relational Mapping)

Laravel is based on Eloquent ORM which provides support for almost all database engines. It works perfectly with MySQL and SQLite. PHP’s implementation of the active record pattern. This pattern allows us to present database tables as classes. Instances of this class are tied to each row in the table.

Template Engine

Blade is the templating engine of Laravel. Blade provides a handful amount of helper function to format your data within views. Blade also implement the template inheritance which you can use to create complex layouts.

Artisan

Laravel offers a built-in tool for the command line is known as Artisan which allows performing the majority of those tedious and repetitive programming tasks. These artisans can be utilized to create the database structure, a skeleton code, and build their migration that becomes pretty easy-to-manage the database system. It can also be interlaced to generate the basic MVC files right away through the command-line and manage those assets and their respective configurations. Artisan even helps developers to create their own commands and do convenient things with it.

Security

Application security is one of the most important concerns in web application development and Laravel provides an intuitive way to create secure web applications. It uses hashed and salted passwords that means the password would never save as the plain text in a database. It also uses the “Bcrypt Hashing Algorithm” in order to generate an encrypted representation of a password. Laravel provides security from SQL injection attacks and also escape all user inputs to avoid the injection of any script tags.

Testing

Laravel comes with PHP Unit out of the box to test your applications. It is capable of running many tests to ensure that new changes done by programmers do not unexpectedly break anything in the web application. Laravel is considered to have stable releases in the industry as it is careful of the known failures. In addition to this, it makes it easy to write unit-tests for its own code.

Routing

Routing in Laravel very easy to understand and much like the Ruby on Rails framework. Laravel routing can be used to create a restful application with ease. You can group routes, name them, apply filters to them and bind your model data to them. Laravel routes can use to create search engines friendly URLs with great flexibility and control.

Conclusion

Laravel has proven itself as the best PHP framework due to all the above features and constant improvement. Laravel helps to create a powerful application using a simple and expressive way.

What is Laravel ? Why it is popular ?