For any application to develop, choosing the right framework can be a very difficult task. There are many PHP development frameworks available. However, developers prefer Laravel as it has a set of PHP files that facilitates programming with PHP, also it provides the additional features and capabilities using which makes it easy to implement functions and methods to do the work.
It was built in February 2012 by Taylor Otwell using the best practices recommended by most experienced developers with security in mind. Laravel programming is one of the powerful PHP development frameworks to build web applications like e-commerce websites and more. It is designed with simple and modern toolkit such as eloquent ORM, painless routing, powerful queue library, and simple authentication for creating full-featured techniques with the web application. it is a very stable, open source, and MVC supported framework that can keep the web application that is built on it very responsive.
Laravel is the ultimate PHP framework for web development and has 51192 repositories on GitHub making it the best PHP framework of 2019.
Here are some of the key features of Laravel which is why it is preferred by web developers over other platforms for developing web applications.
Open source platform:
Laravel has a strong community of developers. The benefit of being an open source is that you free yourself from vendors locking. As an open source platform, you are free to work with open standards with external components that are not provided by the vendor. It’s developed by a far larger community of laravel developers; it’s tested by a far larger community wherever it could be.
Another advantage of open source platform is that it is constantly being updated with more new features and its active community provides more extendable and flexible support than ever provided by any vendor.
Laravel has a great community meetup called Laracon with 6000 plus Laravel developers. They regularly conduct meetups in different big cities all over the world to share the experience and best practices with other developers.
Biyearly update system:
Laravel releases its updates biyearly. That means almost every six months it releases its own new version. This makes Laravel a topic of interest for Laravel developers because every time they release a new version they include great functionality to it. On the previous release of Laravel version 5.7, they have added 10 to 12 new features. And also in the new release in Feb 2019, there are maybe 4 or 5 new functions in the Laravel 5.8.
Packages:
Laravel comes with many official packages including Cashier, Envoy, Horizon, Passport, Scout, Socialite. This means for almost every feature you want to use, you can have a package for that. And that’s the cool thing about Laravel.
It also supports a lot of other packages that are considered to be unofficial packages. If you go to packalyst.com which has all the packages for Laravel only. It has 16,000 plus packages on this.
And the greatest part of using Laravel packages is that you don’t have to care about registering your package on the Laravel. Because from the version 5.5 an onwards you get this feature which is called auto package discovery. This means you just have to install the package via your computer and Laravels detects the packages automatically and then it is ready to use. To further extend this, it also allows users to disable this feature for a few specific features. This feature of automatic package discovery was not possible in the previous version.
API support:
If you want to create an API for your Laravel project, Laraval has a built-in package called a passport package to help you. And if you just want to create an API, Taylor Otwell has also thought of that. He knew what if someone only wants to create API? So he has created the micro-framework called Luman. Luman excludes the view rendering part and only used for creating the API and that’s the great part that.
Painless deployment:
Once you have created the website it is obvious that you have to deploy it on the server. And that is a painful task. This pain is resolved once again by Taylor Otwell by creating Laravel forge. You can simply log on to forge.laravel.com where you can easily create your server via Digital Ocean, Linode, AWS, etc. and you don’t have to do anything. Just go there and connect with Digital Ocean and GitHub and your project are on the server. You do not need to do any configurations. Everything is set up by forge itself.
Testing tools:
Laravel is a back-end PHP framework. That means the server-side. Obviously the server-side has some front-end and PHP unit comes handy if you want to test your PHP code. Laravel Dusk is an awesome feature on the Laravel. It has VueJS or ReactJS the two top frameworks of JavaScript included inside the Laravel. It is used for testing the front-end. You don’t have to worry about how you can connect VueJS or ReactJS to the Laravel project. Suppose you have some click events on the view. When you click on a button then VueJS catch the event and do something about it. Then you can simulate that thing and test that via Laravel Dusk.
And to compile all these things we have Webpack, which is also included in Laravel as a Laravel Mix. You can write codes on the JavaScript frameworks like VueJS or ReactJS and then combine all in a single file App.JS with a single click.
Multi-language:
The idea that the English language can be understood in every part of the world is not exactly true. Laravel provides the localization which is another cool feature of it. That means you can create a project or a website in many different languages. Most of the organizations nowadays are global by nature and want their websites for everyone around the world. If the framework is not multi-lingual, most of the population of the world will not be able to easily access your website or read its content. And this is why web developers prefer to use Laravel because it is especially good for developing websites for businesses looking to expand in various parts of the world.
Database management:
You may have worked hours, and made many changes to the database, and here comes the toughest task for developers, to keep the database in sync between development machines. Laravel made this task very easy. Using the Laravel migration feature, it becomes flawless for developers to migrate the changes in any other platform. Migration lets you define within a file how your database should look including any update you are doing on the way.
It will help you expand your database structure without recreating it every time. Especially if you are working on your own project and you are switching between the computers. All you have to do is to keep the entire database work in migration and seeds, and you can easily migrate the changes in any other development machine you want.
And this is one of the reasons which makes Laravel the best PHP framework.
Security:
Although there is no framework that is completely secure. However, it depends on the way the application is developed and its code and structure. No matter whichever the framework you are using, it must be secure. And Laravel takes care of it. It protects you in several ways. For instance, it does provide security against SQL injection by using prepared SQL statements to make injection attacks unconceivable. This is a simple way to escape user input that may come in through your forum.
In terms of password security, it uses hashes to make sure the password is never saved in the database as simple plain text. Password is always represented in the form of encryption which is done by using Bcrypt hashing algorithm
It also protects from CRF attack using CRF token. This method generates token code and checks each request on the post prior to giving access to a user to get the request. Using Laravel you are also protected from mass assignment vulnerabilities. It allows you to set which field in your table is allowed to save the mass assignment.
MVC Support:
Laravel also supports MVC (Model View Controller framework) architecture as compared to other PHP frameworks. And this is another reason Laravel is considered the best framework for developing a web application.
The general purpose of MVC is to separate functionality, logic, and interface in an application. This ensures optimum performance, better documentation, and offers multiple functionalities. It also enables clarity between the logic and presentation highly efficient. Which makes development easy and attractive.
Object-Oriented Libraries:
Another reason that makes Laravel a good choice among other PHP frameworks is its object-oriented libraries and pre-installed libraries such as advanced authentication. which are hard to find in other PHP frameworks. it is stuffed with many advanced features that are easy to implement, like checking active users, encryption, CSRF protection, password reset, and hashing algorithm, etc.
Job oriented framework:
You can build almost anything you want using the Laravel platform. And that’s why it’s so demanding. Jobs are never going to end for the Laravel. If you are searching for the job as a PHP web developer, just go to larajobs.com where you can find as many companies involving as a partner, providing the jobs for you. On Github trends, if you check on PHP framework the first one you will see is Laravel. This shows how much popular Laravel is in the PHP community. It’s much easier to create something as it has a great community where everyone is trying to help each other.
Conclusion:
Laravel is a popular framework mainly because of its incredible features for developing the modern application. Laravel has a huge community of developers that actively provide extensive support.
Most developers like it for its classy appearance, elegant syntax, and improved readability which are really helpful for creating great web application projects.
If you are really looking forward to building a modern, yet secured, and scalable website for your business. You should start your web application project using the Laravel PHP framework. It is considered to be the best PHP framework in decades by web developers.
