The popularity of Laravel is on the rise due to its incredible features and it’s fast becoming our favorite PHP framework. It is the Most Starred PHP Framework on Github. Thanks to Taylor Otwell who developed this magical web framework.
This framework is young and promising, but it uses a lot of best practices one needs for its business use. This PHP framework suffices the open source application development needs of small as well as enterprise businesses. Its large community support provides a quick resolution of your programming problems. It is a web framework that will make software delivery more streamlined.
Laravel is a scalable PHP framework and here are some of the best features of PHP Laravel Framework which makes it popular among developers and businesses:
Consistent Documentation
All the releases of Laravel were developer friendly, i.e. whenever Taylor introduced a new version of Laravel, it was well documented. From a developer’s point of view, it looks very familiar, meaning they can relate it to previous versions. The coding style and commenting abilities were very consistent and detailed.
MVC Architecture Support
Laravel supports MVC architecture pattern which ensures separates business logic and presentation layers. MVC pattern of Laravel has a lot of built-in functions, improves application performance and increases security as well as scalability.
Authorisation Technique
Each owner of the web application needs to ensure that users are who they claim to be and thus prevent unauthorized users from gaining access to secured/paid resources.
Laravel makes implementing authentication very simple. Almost everything is configured out-of-the-box. Laravel also provides a simple way to organize authorization logic and control access to resources.
Object-Oriented Libraries
One of the top reasons which make Laravel one of the popular PHP framework is it has Object Oriented libraries and many other pre-installed options, which are not found in any other popular PHP frameworks. One of the pre-installed libraries is the Authentication library. Although it is easy to implement, it has many advanced features, such as checking active users, CSRF (Cross-site Request Forgery) protection, Bcrypt hashing, password reset and encryption to name a few.
Artisan
Laravel framework offers a built-in command line tool called Artisan which helps automating the majority of tedious repetitive programming tasks. These artisans can also be utilized to create the database structure, a skeleton code, and manage migration so it is pretty easy-to-manage database system. In addition, it can generate basic MVC files through command-line and manage those assets as well as their respective configurations. Artisan even helps developers to create their own commands and use them as required.
Fixing Technical Vulnerabilities
Laravel helps to secure the web application by protecting it against the most serious security risks: SQL injection, cross-site request forgery, and cross-site scripting. Laravel itself is secure.
URL Routing Configuration
All Laravel routes are defined in the app/Http/routes.php file, which is automatically loaded by the framework. The most basic Laravel routes simply accept a URI and a Closure, providing a very simple and expressive method of defining routes.
Database Migration System
Laravel migration system helps to expand the web application database structure without re-creating everytime when there is a change in code. Because of this feature, the risk of losing data is very minimal. It not only offers the facility to change the database structure but also helps to do using PHP code instead of SQL. Laravel Schema Builder helps creating database tables and inserts indices or columns promptly.
Scheduling Task Configuration and Management
In the past, developers have generated a Cron entry for each task they need to schedule. However, this is a headache. Such task schedule is no longer in source control, and developers must SSH into the server to add the Cron entries. The Laravel command scheduler allows for the fluent and expressive defining of command schedule within Laravel itself, and only a single Cron entry is needed on the server.
Security
Laravel takes handles security from within its framework. It uses salted and hashed password, which means that your password will never save as the plain text in database. It uses Bcrypt hashing algorithm for generating an encrypted representation of a password. Laravel also uses prepared SQL statements which make injection attacks unimaginable.
Unit-Testing
Laravel is a preferred framework for web application developers today due to the way it facilitates unit testing. This framework is capable of running multiple unit tests to ensure that new changes done by the developer do not unexpectedly break the web application. Ideally, Laravel based web applications are capable of stable releases as it is careful of the known failures. It also makes it easy for the developers to write unit-tests.