PHP is the most popular server-side scripting language in the world. It has come a long way from small snippets embedded in the code of static HTML pages to the modern language on which most modern dynamic sites are designed. The complexity and functionality of modern sites only increase, and no one wants to write all the necessary code from scratch. Programmers need to develop complex sites and web applications, which usually takes a very long time. This can be easily and efficiently completed by using various CMS’s like WordPress or Drupal. Frameworks also have been created to facilitate the development process for programmers.
This article describes why the Laravel is the best framework along with its huge possibilities and exciting features, with a few great examples of websites built with it. Let’s get started!
Laravel is the best framework for PHP
Laravel is a framework for web applications with expressive and elegant syntax. It will simplify the solution of the main sore tasks such as authentication, routing, sessions and caching. Laravel is an attempt to unite all the best elements in other PHP frameworks.
The main advantages of the Laravel framework
- A large ecosystem with a momentary unfolding of its platform, as the official site provides many manuals and information for examination
- Laravel documentation is close to perfection
- Laravel has its own platform for Blade templates, a "beautiful" language syntax that helps solve all the necessary tasks, such as authentication, sessions, caching, and RESTful routing
Despite its youth (the first release was in 2011), it is already a completely mature product, and according to a survey conducted by the SitePoint portal, it ranks first in popularity among developers in PHP.
The popularity of the Laravel framework
In order to evaluate the popularity of the framework, there are several sources of usage statistics. Here we have used those provided by Google Trends.
As you can see from the statistics of Google Trends, the Laravel framework takes a confident first place and is constantly gaining popularity without slowing down. That is very good, considering this is a global statistic.
Possibility of Laravel
- Package — allows you to create and connect modules in Composer format to the application on Laravel. Many optional capabilities are already available in the form of such modules.
- Eloquent ORM — an implementation of the ActiveRecord design pattern in PHP. It allows you to strictly define the relationships between database objects. Fluent, the standard query builder for Laravel, is supported by the Eloquent core.
- The logic of the application — part of the application under development, announced either with the help of controllers or routes. Backward routing makes a connection between the application’s generated links and routes, allowing you to modify the latter with automatic updates of related links. When creating links using the named route, Laravel automatically generates the final URLs.
- REST-controllers — an additional layer for separating the logic of processing GET and POST-requests of HTTP.
- Auto-load classes — a mechanism for automatically loading PHP classes without having to plugin their definition files in include. Download on-demand prevents the download of unnecessary components, only those that are actually used are downloaded.
- Compilers of representation — blocks of code that are executed when a representation of the template is generated. Inversion of control — allows you to receive object instances on the principle of reverse control. It can also be used to create and retrieve singletons.
- Migrations — the control system of versions for databases. It allows you to connect changes in the application code with the changes needed in the database structure, which simplifies the deployment and updating of the application.
- Module testing (unit tests) — plays a very large role in Laravel, which itself contains a large number of tests to prevent errors.
- Page output — simplifies the generation of pages, replacing the various ways of solving this task with a single mechanism built into Laravel.
Features of the framework
Laravel is a special framework with strong branding, so almost everything in Laravel has a unique name.
Dotenv
Where do you store the secret information of your application, such as the password to the database, the login for email, and other things? Laravel 5 uses the well-known .env file, which also uses many frameworks for other programming languages. This is the file in which you define key-value pairs for any of your private information.
PSR-4
Laravel — the first framework supporting PSR-4. Right out of the box, Composer will automatically download all the classes from the app directory using the autoload standard PSR-.
This means that you can have one namespace for your application, and you can structure it as you like. Laravel does not require you to place certain files in certain folders.
IoC container — kernel extensions
The reverse control container in Laravel is a powerful tool for managing class dependencies. The implementation of dependencies is a way of removing hard-coded class dependencies. Instead of this, dependencies are implemented at runtime, providing more flexibility, since the implementation of dependencies can be easily changed.
You can use the IoC container in your application to make everything embeddable and easily testable with the help of module stubs. The IoC container can extract classes without any configuration.
Queries forms
There is a delightful opportunity in Laravel called queries forms. This is queries check for your controllers. This is not just a data check, but a complete query processing.
Eloquent
Eloquent ORM, included in Laravel, is the most powerful implementation of the ActiveRecord template in PHP. In addition to the usual CRUD operations, it has soft delete, query areas, relationships, access methods and mutators, date mutators, model observers, and much more.
Versions Cycle
Laravel has a very predictable cycle of versions. Every six months there will be another version. Laravel comes out after one month of the release of Symfony.
You get either a version with new features or a version with a completely new number. Versions with bug fixes are published every few months. This is good because the framework is developed very quickly, and you can expect to receive security improvements and other improvements as quickly as possible.
SSH tasks
Laravel has an easy way for SSH connections to remote servers and running commands, which allows you to create tasks easily that work on remote servers.
Flysystem
Flysystem is a delightful package from the League of Extraordinary Packages for managing file systems. It's a file system using connectors, with which you can easily interact with local, awss3, dropbox, Rackspace, and other file systems in the cloud.
If you've been using the latest technology for the front end in the past few years, then you probably used a preprocessor for your CSS files and JavaScript. But if not, then Laravel will take care of this.
You need the most optimized online version of your application. This means that you need to reduce and combine your CSS files and JavaScript.
Instead of using any PHP packages for this, Laravel offers the Elixir package for the executors of the NodeJS Gulp tasks. This lets you use all the advantages of NodeJS and Gulp that you like.
You can just run the Gulp-task watch and let Elixir take care of everything for you if you use LESS and CoffeeScript:
compiled.php
Any full-featured framework is loaded with thousands of files and ads. Usually, they are processed by Composer startup, but for the most used files, Artisan can create a file compiled.php. It is loaded with each request and combines all the classes used in your application.
The most used files and classes are compiled into a single file, which significantly reduces the application load time. If you have files that need to be loaded with each request, you can also specify which files to compile into compiled.php.
Then this file is optimized by the PHP runtime, so you can avoid productivity loss when loading thousands of files into your working environment.
HHVM
When you want to improve the productivity of your PHP code, you can change the PHP environment to a highly optimized runtime environment for PHP from Facebook — HHVM.
Laravel is one of the first frameworks supporting HHVM, and it passes 100% unit tests on HHVM. So you can easily switch your application from PHP to HHVM and get even more productivity.
Cashier
Laravel Cashier provides an expressive, flexible interface for the services of billing subscriptions Stripe. It handles almost all the template codes for billing subscriptions that you are afraid to write.
In addition to basic subscription management, the Cashier can handle coupons, substitution of subscriptions, "number" of subscriptions, discount periods, and even generate PDF files of accounts.
Community and documentation
Today, each framework has a large and friendly community, and Laravel is no exception. People who support and develop Laravel packages are very friendly, and you can easily participate in creating any package, and your edits will be accepted very soon.
This helps to expand the community, and you should know that Laravel was listed among the most popular PHP frameworks in 2013, leaving behind Phalcon, Symfony2, and CodeIgniter. And in August 2014 Laravel became the most popular and viewed PHP project on GitHub.
Examples of Laravel sites
With the help of Laravel, as well as the basis of any other framework, you can make all different types of sites, from landings to social networks.
This is their fundamental difference from CMS, which, in the majority, is highly specialized.
At the end of this express introduction to Laravel, we’ve collected a small list of sites developed on the Laravel framework so you can see what can be achieved with this framework:
- ambassadorpark.be — Multilingual Landing
- stichoza.com — landing with voice control
- phaser.io — business card website game framework Phaser
- laracasts.com — portal, dedicated to Laravel, with its own forum
- exploregeorgia.org — business card website
- fox47.com — news portal
The projects presented above are diverse in type, but the sites are typical in that they have no unique functionality.
The possibility of developing non-standard solutions is the main feature of Laravel and frameworks in general, which distinguishes them from CMS.
Therefore, we’ve also included a list of Laravel projects that have no analogs among existing sites:
Conclusion
Here we have shown why Laravel is the best framework for today. Laravel continues to grow rapidly since it is a huge ecosystem that includes hosting and a platform for application deployment.
Today, most projects developed with the help of frameworks are created using Laravel. In the end, it is your decision whether you use it or not. If you want to experience its huge advantages and possibilities, feel free to contact us. Our seasoned web support team is waiting for you to create the great web project you dream of!
