What is Laravel - Features & works

Zia

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Mar 21, 2024

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Laravel

Laravel is an open-source PHP framework for users working on Web application development. Considered an alternative to CakePHP and Codelgniter, Laravel uses the Model-View-Controller (MVC), design pattern to facilitate the development of Web applications quickly and easily. Laravel is a Web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. Laravel eases the use of common, tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing sessions, and caching.

Hypertext processor, commonly known as PHP, is an HTML-based scripting language that is widely used for web development. PHP was earlier called the Personal Home Page and has undergone many version updates to reach its current form. Due to its ease of working, it is one of the most widely supported programming languages, especially by the open-source community. The immense support has resulted in the widespread availability of PHP libraries that are available on the internet as open-source code.

Although there are a variety of libraries available, it is important to meet the standards and guidelines defined for writing Web application Codes, which is a time-consuming process. It is also an effort to find accurate information on the internet, install dependencies, configure each library, and include them in different files. This is where frameworks are useful.

A framework is a basic templating structure that is used to develop, test, and deploy applications rapidly and efficiently. Using a framework helps a developer focus on the actual problem and application logic and provides tools to perform tasks easily. It is also used for the following purposes:

To provide an abstraction
To handle repetitive and menial tasks
To arrange things in a logical structure

The Laravel framework reuses and assembles existing components, dependencies, and libraries to automate time-consuming tasks. This helps Web developers to build Web applications in a structured manner.

How Laravel Works

Here is a brief overview of how Laravel works:

Routing: Laravel provides a simple and elegant way to define application routes. These routes define the URL patterns that map to specific controllers and actions.
Controllers: Controllers in Laravel are responsible for handling incoming HTTP requests and returning responses to the client. They contain the business logic of the application and interact with models and services to process the request.
Models: Models in Laravel represent the data and business logic of the application. They interact with the database and provide an interface to manipulate data.
Views: Views in Laravel are responsible for presenting data to the user. They contain HTML markup and are typically rendered using a templating engine like Blade.
Middleware: Middleware in Laravel is a set of filters that can be applied to incoming requests and outgoing responses. They can modify or enhance the request/response before or after it is processed by the controller.
Services: Services in Laravel are used to encapsulate complex business logic that is not directly related to a specific controller or model. They can be used to perform tasks such as sending emails and interacting with external APIs.
Artisan: Artisan is a command-line interface included with Laravel that provides a set of tools for performing common development tasks such as generating code, running database migrations, and managing application configuration.

Features of Laravel

Laravel includes a consistent API and includes several components to perform common tasks such as database interactions with ease.

1. Convention over Configuration:

Laravel has many conventions. If these conventions are properly followed, it can predict the dependencies and automate the configuration-related tasks. the convention over configuration feature of Laravel reduces the time and effort required to set up and configure services. Such environments are suitable for rapid Application Development.

One simple example of convention over configuration can be seen in the process of using models to retrieve records stored in a table. If a model is created with the name Employee, then it will implicitly try to retrieve records from the table name employees, which is the plural snake case of an employee. If the table name is not the plural snake case name of the Model, then the table name would have to be explicitly defined in the code of the Model.

2. MVC Architecture:

Since Laravel is based on Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture, the programming logic is divided into the following:

Models: Models define the way data is visualized and stored. Models are objects that represent resources utilized in an application. Usually, they are used to handle records in a database. Hence, models can be used to represent different entities, such as an employee a user, or an item. Models are objects that are instances of Eloquent's base Model class. This object can be efficiently used to hold records from the database table and perform operations on it. The Eloquent ORM programming techniques allow the Model to interact more with records in a database.
Views: Views define the way Web pages appear. They are responsible for generating Web pages returned as responses with the help of a controller. They can be written as standard PHP files or can be dynamically built using the Blade templating language, which gives a modular approach to creating them. The blade allows complex views to be created from simpler layouts.
Controllers: Controllers define the requirements for different requests. In simpler terms, controllers take a request and then, depending on the request generate appropriate responses. Similar to servers, controllers are where the actual processing of requests takes place, such as handling submissions and interacting with the databases.

All of these have powerful classes that define a lot of methods. These methods do most of the work and provide abstraction from the underlying code. This allows a developer to focus more on what logic should be implemented than how it should be implemented.

3. Artisan Command for Automation:

The artisan tool is included in the Laravel suite. It is an automation tool that helps to set up and configure the various components for operations related to Web application development. it can be used to create models, views, and controllers pre-filled with a template. It can also be used to create dummy servers, perform database operations, and many more.

4. Helper Functions:

Many commonly used functions in Web application development may require developers to import different libraries. Laravel includes a variety of global PHP functions called Helper that help reduce the time and effort of developers by taking care of commonly used operations. Laravel itself utilizes these helper functions in its classes, functions, and even configurations. Laravel classifies these helper functions into the following categories:

Arrays and Objects: This helper can be used to perform operations on arrays and objects. Some operations include strong values (Arr:sort()), getting the value of the first (head()) or last element (last()), and setting values at a position (Arr: sort()).
Paths: These helpers store the paths of commonly used locations such as the path of the resource directly (resource_path()), the path of the app directory (app_path()), and the path of the configuration directory (config_path()).
Strings: These helpers can be used to perform operations on a string such as finding if it contains another substring (str::contains()), and transforming the string into camel case (str::camel()).
URLs: These helpers can be used to sanitize or generate URLs, such as sanitizing a URL into a secure URL.
Miscellaneous: The options that do not fit any categories are present in miscellaneous, such as finding values of environment variables (env()), finding the current date (today()), and redirecting the user to another URL (redirect()).

5. Extensive Library:

Laravel is a framework that includes a lot of popular and commonly used libraries. These libraries would have to be manually installed and configured when creating Web Applications without Laravel. Authentication is one such example, which can be easily used to authenticate users while taking of security issues such as handling attacks that include SQL injection, Authentication bypass, cross-site Request forgery, encryption, and logging.

History of Laravel

Version | Release Date | Key Features

Laravel 1 | June 2011 | Initial release
Laravel 2 | September 2011 | Added support for controllers, migrations, and unit testing.
Laravel 3 | February 2012 | Added support for bundles, and improved routing and templating.
Laravel 4 | May 2013 | Improved routing, added composer integration, and introduced Eloquent ORM.
Laravel 5 | February 2015 | Added support for method injection, middleware, and event broadcasting.
Laravel 6 | September 2019 | Added support for semantic versioning, Laravel Vapor, and improved error handling.
Laravel 7 | March 2020 | Added support for Laravel Airlock, improved route caching, and introduced new features for Blade components.
Laravel 8 | September 2020 | Added support for Laravel Jetstream, added features for model factory classes, and improved routing and testing.
Laravel 9 | Not released yet | Currently in development, planned to include improvements in authentication, event listeners, and more.

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Zia

Zia, founder and CEO of Texvn and Toolx, is a passionate entrepreneur and tech enthusiast. With a strong focus on empowering developers, he creates innovative tools and content, making coding and idea generation easier.