It has been more than two decades and PHP being just a server-side language is still in vogue. Quite interesting, isn’t it? And each year the demand for knowledgeable and experienced PHP developers just heats up. In simple words, in the battle of technological supremacy, PHP somehow manages to maintain its position even after hitting rock bottom. Its claws are still intact, as a result with PHP you can never go wrong.
Choosing a framework is more like choosing an asset for your company. After all, this is supposed to be the main fundamental of your entire building, I mean the website. Mere negligence can cause huge losses.
Image source: w3techs.com.
Now developing a website can be extremely cumbersome with writing more than thousands of codes at a time. And this is one of the core reasons why choosing the right framework can help. Much like the PHP language, even PHP frameworks have gained a lot of momentum lately. Now I am sure you must have heard of Laravel, Cake PHP, Yii, CodeIgniter, Symfony, Phalcon, and Lumen, all of these are PHP frameworks. Now since we have a limited amount of time and space, I would just like to take one at a time. As the title suggests, the following post focuses on why you must consider Laravel for your web development project.
Everything to know about the Laravel framework
In this segment, we will be discussing what a Laravel Framework is and how it turns out to be different from its budding PHP frameworks. We all know that Laravel is an open-source framework used for conducting seamless web development projects. Apart from that, it comprises a wide range of tools that can assist you in developing dynamic, scalable, and robust applications and websites. Taylor Otwell was the person behind this grand achievement. What he intended back then was to assist professionals while creating complex codes faster.
It may quite interest you to know that around 77.3% of websites are created using PHP programming language as well as frameworks. And not to mention that Laravel turns out to be the most popular tech stack. Since so many people are already using it, the Laravel community seems to be growing at a fanatic pace. So, in case, if a developer gets stuck with Laravel, he or she can find help right away.
- Successful web development is possible by using web resources, and web APIs.
- If you are looking for a framework that is best in regard to performance, features, and scalability, this is it!
- By using the MVC paradigm, seamless results can be obtained.
Further, I would like to mention certain features that make the Laravel framework a cut above other PHP frameworks.
Related: How to Install Laravel Homestead for Local Development?
Features of Laravel framework
Laravel is a great choice for PHP web development because of its comprehensive feature set. It has everything you need to get started with PHP development, including a built-in web server, easy database integration, and robust security. Laravel also makes it easy to scale your applications by providing a number of built-in tools for managing your application’s resources. Let’s discuss some of the most vital features of Laravel.
1. Support for MVC architecture
One of the most intimidating features of the Laravel framework is that it uses MVC architectural pattern. So, it becomes extremely easy for developers to get things detached and take care of precise development features, regardless of the application type.
Due to the MVC architecture, writing clean and legible code is more or less possible. Apart from that, you don’t have to worry about better documentation as well.
2. Object-oriented library
The next feature to talk about is the object-oriented library. In fact, it may quite interest you to know that of all the object-oriented libraries found in Laravel, you won’t find them anywhere else. Not even in any other PHP framework. What exactly these libraries do is, check how many active users are there, look out for cross-site request forgery, bcrypt hashing, reset passwords, work on encrypting the data, and whatnot!
3. Database migration
Another feature to reckon with when it comes to Laravel frameworks is seamless database migration. You see while developing any application, developers are compelled to make numerous changes in their respective databases by using different interfaces and machines. As a result, updating these databases is extremely important. By not doing so, you are compromising in regard to security as well as there won’t be any seamless workflow. So yes, to make everything right, database migration is important.
4. Artisan
Artisan is mainly used in the context of the command line interface. What exactly the Artisan is meant to do is, assists in creating a controller, make seamless data migration, create test data using Tinker, and most important of all, an artisan can become a service provider.
5. Routing systems
It may quite interest you to know that here designers are often given a choice to pick which route to activate in the app. I am precisely talking about courses/HTTP/PHP files. By defining the route, a URL is created and later on embedded automatically.
6. Blade template engine
Another intimidating feature is the blade template engine. This is one of the best features which is already pre-installed and assures high assistance in managing data and source code processing. Here there is a possibility of generating files with conditional statements.
A Blade template engine offers control statements and shortcuts.
7. Eloquent ORM
Object-Relational Mapping highly promotes database object and relationship interaction. Another interesting aspect here is the separation of code. Here designers can easily modify web pages within a short span of time. In fact, Laravel is much preferred over Codeigniter due to its coding pattern. And since the code is highly separated, developers can fix bugs extremely at a high pace.
See also: Ruby on Rails (RoR) for Web Development: Pros and Cons.
Why should you consider the Laravel Framework for PHP web development?
If you don’t believe me, you can check the GitHub stats of Laravel by yourself. Still, many of you come up with this question, there are so many PHP frameworks around such as Symfony, Codeigniter, CakePHP, and Phalcon, then how does Laravel manage to remain a cut above for web development?
1. Faster time to market
One of the biggest benefits of using Laravel for your upcoming web development project is that you get to launch your application ASAP. No kidding, surviving in today’s competitive world is not easy. You need the best team of Laravel developers at your service. Also, Laravel as a framework comprises a wide range of pre-built features and structures that make the work of a Laravel developer extremely easygoing.
On and all, the development process of Laravel is pretty high in comparison to other frameworks. So Laravel is pretty quick and intuitive. Gone are the days when developers were supposed to spend long long hours and weeks writing individual lines of code.
2. Security
Another astounding feature of Laravel is high-end security. Not to mention today security breaches are happening every now and then. So yes, you do require a framework that offers high-end security so that you don’t have to spend differently. Today, security is not considered an afterthought. In fact, it has been taken into consideration before the development procedure begins. And that’s where Laravel comes to play. It has a wide range of security features that offer protection against CSRF, CSS, or SQL injection seamlessly.
There is probably no scope for any security threats or malware activities to penetrate. It may quite interest you to know the use of hashed and salted passwords.
3. Traffic is easy to handle
Another interesting benefit offered by Laravel in comparison to other PHP frameworks is handling traffic. With the slow and steady of your website growing and gaining popularity, traffic or visitors are bound to come. If you want to succeed in the present situation, it is advisable for a web app to fetch as much traffic as possible. This also means that website hosting will be getting an immense amount of pressure. Chances are pretty high for your website to stop functioning at any moment.
This could be your worst nightmare! Well, Laravel has the ability and potential to support a message queue system to conduct appropriate load balancing. Now what exactly the system does it assists developers in maintaining a healthy server without much effort. This also leads to effective traffic management. So, if the web server is healthy and traffic can be easily managed, what else do you want?
In fact, here you can achieve a unified API across different queue backends. Not to mention, you can defer the processing of a time-consuming task. For example, you can send emails easily.
4. Comprehensive support
Do you think you can, or anyone can succeed if the framework doesn’t offer comprehensive support? Of course, not! When speaking of Laravel, we have Laracasts. Here you will come across a rare collection of both free and paid tutorials featuring practical learning aspects, theoretical know-how, and whatnot! You will find a good understanding of commands and syntaxes in these documents.
5. Testing
Last but certainly not least is the testing process. Creating any successful app requires precise testing procedures to be done. Laravel Dusk is more or less like testing support that enables developers to conduct tests seamlessly and effectively. The entire process is automated and as a result, developers get ample time to focus on innovation and of course, their core competencies.
Use cases of Laravel PHP framework
- Enterprise-level apps.
- Backend data management.
- IoT technological infrastructures.
- Offshore development.
- High-end security.
Related: 15 Good Reasons to Use Python in Web Development.
Final words
On and all, Laravel is here to stay, no two ways about it! The big question is whether you will leverage the technology or not. Of course, picking the right framework is a hard nut to crack but let me tell you one thing, with Laravel you can never go wrong! A framework that’s quite popular in nature, that offers seamless third-party integration, high in regard to performance and support, reduces the cost of development, backed by a huge and active community, what else do you want?
I hope by now you agree on why it is possible to develop secure, fast, enterprise web applications using Laravel Framework. I hope you did find the post loud, clear, and meaningful. If yes, do help us by sharing it with your peers.
In case, if you still have any doubts or queries, feel free to mention that in the comment section below.
This article is written by Hardik Dhanani. Hardik is from TatvaSoft and has a strong technical proficiency and domain expertise which comes from managing multiple development projects for clients from different demographics. Hardik helps clients gain added advantage over compliance and technological trends. He is one of the core members of the technical analysis team.
Web Developer & SEO Specialist with 15+ years of experience in Open Source Web Development specialized in Joomla & WordPress development. He is also the moderator of this blog "RS Web Solutions".