What is Laravel? A Beginner’s Introduction

Whether you’re new to web development or just curious about Laravel. This post will answer the simple question, what is Laravel in easy to understand terms.

Since the first release of Laravel over 10 years ago in 2011, Laravel has become the fastest growing PHP frameworks on the market. Quickly surpassing other popular frameworks such as Symfony, CodeIgniter and Yii in interest:

What is Laravel

Laravel is a popular open-source PHP web framework designed for building web applications following the model-view-controller (MVC) architectural pattern. Created by Taylor Otwell, Laravel is known for its elegant syntax, developer-friendly features, and extensive documentation. Here are some key aspects of Laravel:

Key Features

1. MVC Architecture:
   • Laravel follows the MVC pattern, which separates the application’s logic (Model), user interface (View), and user input (Controller). This structure helps in organizing and managing the code efficiently.
2. Eloquent ORM:
   • Eloquent is Laravel’s built-in object-relational mapping (ORM) tool that provides a simple, active record implementation for working with the database. It allows developers to interact with the database using an expressive syntax.
3. Routing:
   • Laravel offers a simple and flexible routing system to define the routes of the application. This helps in mapping web requests to the appropriate controller actions.
4. Blade Templating Engine:
   • Blade is Laravel’s powerful templating engine, which allows developers to create dynamic content easily and includes features like template inheritance and sections.
5. Artisan Command Line Tool:
   • Artisan is the command-line interface included with Laravel. It provides various helpful commands for development tasks such as database migrations, seeding, and running tests.
6. Database Migrations:
   • Migrations provide a version control system for the database schema, allowing developers to define and share the application’s database schema.
7. Security:
   • Laravel includes features like hashed passwords, protection against SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and cross-site request forgery (CSRF) to enhance the security of the applications.
8. Authentication and Authorization:
   • Laravel provides a comprehensive authentication system out-of-the-box, including user registration, login, password reset, and more. Authorization features are also built-in to manage user permissions.
9. RESTful Controllers:
   • Laravel makes it easy to create RESTful APIs and manage HTTP requests, responses, and routing.
10. Task Scheduling:
    • The framework includes a task scheduling system that allows developers to define scheduled tasks and automate repetitive tasks within the application.

Features of Laravel

1. Authentication:  It is a very important part of any web application, to authenticate the user in their system, we need to write so much of the code which consumes a lot of time. But here, Laravel makes it much easier for a developer. The authentication feature was introduced after Laravel 5, where we only need to configure the Model, View, and Controller to use Authentication in our Web Application.

2. Dynamic Template: Laravel provides an innovative template engine called “Blade template“, which allows developers to create a dynamic web page. The blade is a powerful templating engine in a Laravel framework that helps to make Dynamic Template in web Applications.

3. Database Migrations: It is a very useful feature provided by Laravel Framework, Where we can easily share database schema without any extra effort. Migrations are files that contain codeto create a database table or make changes in any tables, this files can be used by other team members to make changes in the database by just executing that migration file. It doesn’t have SQL code it just contains PHP code which makes it much easier for any PHP developer to make changes in the Database.

4. MVC Architecture: It divides any application code into 3 parts, which makes code more maintainable and makes modification easier which makes the development process much faster.

5. Unit Testing: Testing is the main part of any application development cycle to check all cases. Laravel provides the feature of Unit Testing, it checks and makes sure that new updates in the code won’t affect another part of the code. It runs several test cases to check that the changes in the code won’t affect another part of the code. A Laravel developer can also write their own test cases.

6. Security: Web Application Security is also considered to be important while the development cycle. But Laravel provides some feature that makes the application more secure. Laravel provides the feature of the “Bcrypt Hashing Algorithm” which generated hashed passwords and stores them in a Database which makes it almost impossible to resolve passwords.

7. Artisan: It is a built-in feature for command-line Artisan. This command-line feature can be very useful to developers. Artisan tool can be used to create skeleton code, database schema, and migration files, and also used to execute those migration files, so it makes it easy to manage a database schema of the system.

Is Laravel frontend or backend?

Laravel is primarily a backend framework. It does offer some minor front-end functionality, but works best with another front-end framework. When it comes to selecting a front-end framework for your Laravel project, there are plenty of options to choose from. One of the popular choices for Laravel is Vue.js. There is plenty of documentation and support online for integrating Vue.js with Laravel, as well as other front-end frameworks.

How is Laravel Different from PHP?

Laravel is a framework, while PHP (or core PHP) is a programming language. A framework is a collection of programming languages, libraries and components. The purpose of using a framework is to make development of a site or app easier and faster. Since frameworks already have common features and tasks built-in. In comparison, if you were to use core PHP to develop a site from scratch it would take ages to write the code entirely. The only real similarity between Laravel and PHP is that both can be used to build web applications. And of course, without knowledge of PHP it would be very difficult for a developer to use the Laravel framework.

Is Laravel a Programming Language?

No. Laravel is a framework built using the PHP scripting language. PHP is an open-source server-side language. In other words, it is a backend language responsible for handling and processing data on a website. PHP on its own can not be used to create a web application. Client-side languages, such as Javascript, HTML and CSS are also needed to form the front-end of an application, alongside PHP.

Why is Laravel Used?

Laravel Developers mainly build custom websites or applications using PHP, alongside other languages. Of course, writing the code from scratch in custom projects could take ages, so a framework like Laravel is used to save time. Some of the key features of Laravel include:

• Built-in Modules: Built-in packages means that you can add ready-made features to your web application, without the need of having to write code from scratch. You can even create your own custom packages separately and add them to your site.
• Automated Testing: Laravel offers both unit testing and feature testing. Unit testing can test small pieces of code. While feature testing can be used to test larger pieces of code or features on the site.
• Route Handling: Using simple names, rather than long path names makes it easier to manage bigger applications. Plus all route names can be changed in one place via a dedicated file, instead of having to manually change route names multiple times throughout the application.
• Security Features: Laravel offers a range of security features, such as user authentication, role authorizations, email verifications, password hashing and more.
• Database Migrations: With version control, database migrations are much easier to manage.
• Template Engine: The Blade template engine allows developers to easily create and maintain lightweight templates for their web pages.
• Eloquent ORM (Object Relational Mapping): Developers can write database queries using PHP syntax rather than SQL code. This makes it faster to manage and query databases.