PHP is a popular scripting language that is especially suited to the development of websites and web applications.
With a faster development cycle and a need to automate repetitive tasks frameworks were introduced at the beginning of the century. A PHP Framework is a platform that provides a structure for rapid application development and helps in reducing development time with better code quality and more reliable applications.
Choosing the right framework for your application is very important as it directly impacts on scalability, modularity, and reliability of the project. Besides the performance prospective other factors which affect the selection of a web development framework is a cost to develop, third party integration, community support and the overall popularity of the framework.
Today there are many PHP Frameworks available with ever upgrading functionalities like – Symfony, CodeIgniter, Drupal, CakePHP, Zend, etc. Yet, Laravel is becoming popular day by day because of its simple way to organize logic and control of various resources.
Laravel is an open-source PHP web framework developed by Taylor Otwell Its architectural patterns are majorly based on Symfony PHP Web Framework.
Laravel gained popularity after the version 3 release which included Command Line Interface called Artisan and Laravel migrations and seeders bundles. Laravel’s first stable version released in June 2011.
An image of Google Trends shown below gives us an idea of tremendous growth and popularity which Laravel has achieved in the last five years globally. 100 value in the image shows the peak popularity of the search term.
Laravel is also one of the popular repositories with 57.8 K Stars and regularly used by many developers
Now that being said let’s discuss what are the reasons behind Laravel becoming so popular and why is Laravel one of the best PHP framework
Key Features of Laravel:
Artisan CLI:
Laravel offers a tool named as Artisan. It is the name of the command-line interface and provides several helpful commands for use while developing an application. It allows performing the majority of repetitive and tedious programming tasks that are very tedious and repetitive. Which no developer likes to perform. For more information on Artisan CLI please click on the link
Data Migration:
As web applications are no becoming more data-dependent and data-sensitive, Laravel migrations and seeders are of great importance in importing/exporting the data. To synchronize data with application advancement is a very arduous task plus there is a risk of data inconsistency. The migration facility given in Laravel helps keep all the database work in movements and seed. It permits easy relocation. This feature of Laravel is of prime importance for its popularity and a great help when dealing with large scale web application
MVC Support:
Model–view–controller and expressive intuitive syntax make Laravel one of the best PHP frameworks.
Architecture like Symfony ensures clarity in logic and presentation. MVC helps in improving performance and allows better control by providing multiple built-in functionalities.
Security:
Today web applications in many cases store financial or sensitive customer information and keeping it secure is very critical. Laravel offers great security to its web applications. It uses the hashed encrypted password storage which is impossible to decrypt.
Laravel also provides security against SQL injection by using SQL statements. Other security features of the Laravel framework are Protecting Cookies, Cross-site request forgery, Mass assignment vulnerabilities, Cross-site Scripting protection and Securing APIs with Auth0
For more information, you can click on the link here
Object-Oriented Libraries:
Laravel features a large collection of OOP Libraries along with other pre-installed libraries. These kind of OOP Libraries are not present in Symphony, CodeIgniter, or any other popular PHP frameworks.
The Authentication Library offers a variety of features. Some like Bcrypt Hashing, CSRF protection, and checking active users.
Blade Templating Engine:
Laravel has an inbuilt template engine known as a Blade templating engine, it was originally introduced in Laravel 5.1.
The USP of Blade is that it doesn’t prevent developers from using simple PHP code in views. Then blade views created will be automatically cached and compiled within the framework.
In certain cases, modifying view may seem like a difficult task when working on large complex projects. Blade templating engine can easily help you to remove or modify statements easliy.
It also provides its conditional statements and loops, which are then mapped to other PHP counterparts.
Multiple File System:
Depending on the need Laravel can support cloud storage such as Amazon or Google Cloud along with local storage.
It is simple to move between storage options as the API remains the same for every system. Developers can use one application to serve files in a distributed environment. This makes web applications highly scalable, cost-effective and secure especially when the application is very large.
Authentication:
Laravel makes implementing authentication very simple. Almost everything is configured for you out of the box. The authentication configuration file is located at config/auth. PHP, in few Artisan commands you can authenticate your web application quick and easy.
Cacheing:
A cache is very important for the optimum performance of any application, By default, Laravel is configured with file cache driver, which stores the serialized, cached objects in the filesystem.
Although it might be advisable to use a more effective caching system when building bigger applications like Redis, for smaller applications cache driver provided by Laravel is sufficient.
Testing:
Testing of any application is very important especially in an agile environment, where changes are often occurring due to user requirements or other reasons.
Support for testing with PHPUnit is included out of the box in Laravel and a PHPUnit. An XML file is already setup for the application.
Additionally, unit testing can also be performed by provided artisan command-line utility, and that’s great!
Conclusion :
The MVC architecture with other robust and helpful functionalities Laravel ensures that the web application developed is highly effective with a large scale of users and changing business environments. Although there are some other frameworks which provide very useful and provide at par features when comparing it with the control maintain and faster built time for building a large scale application Laravel is tried and tested by many development companies
I hope the above article has helped you in understanding Laravel web framework better and hopefully will help you to select one when making a web application, At KGN Technologies we have expertise in eCommerce & CMS technology namely Magento, WordPress, Apart from these we help clients around the world in custom development using frameworks like Laravel, CI and CakePHP. If you are looking to develop an awesome web application for you please get in touch with us by clicking on the link