There are several PHP frameworks for a web development project. Among them Laravel is regarded as the best open-source PHP web framework. It is used for easy and quick web development. Laravel is a favourite among developers for developing good quality web applications and websites. This is possible by using code syntax and MVC architecture that is easily maintainable as well as developer-friendly. Laravel provides many useful features for websites, among them is development speed, quick intuition and fast extension ability. As a framework, Laravel has the maximum number of users both personal and professional. It was found in a survey conducted in the last year that great documentation, clear features and a flourishing and ever-growing community support have made Laravel a total leader in the PHP framework. In fact, Laravel is still moving ahead with great speed, with the rest following.
Some key features of the framework include various ways of accessing relational databases, eloquent ORM, class auto-loading, efficient reverse routing, expressive migration system and restful resourceful controller.One of the most important reason to use Laravel is that developers are able to experience a trouble-free syntax.We have listed here some of the main features of Laravel, which makes it a market leader:
Authentication
Implementing Authentication becomes very simple and easy with Laravel. Almost everything in fact is configured out-of-the-box. The configuration file of authentication is located at config/auth.php. There are various well-documented options to tweak the authentication services behaviour. With Laravel, auth is up & running with a single piece of command.
php artisan make:auth
Localization
The localization features offered by Laravel is a convenient way of retrieving strings of various languages. These strings allow supporting of multiple languages effortlessly within the app. Language strings are stored in files within the /resources/lang/ directory.
Events
This is a very basic yet important feature of Laravel. It enables a simple observer implementation which means it allows one to listen and subscribe for events in the application. Mainly, these event classes are stored in the Events directory. Meanwhile the listeners are stored in Listeners directory.
Pagination
Pagination can be a pain area, but Laravel makes it very easy because it can quickly generate an intelligent “range” of links based on current page and HTML with a simple paginate function. The links generated are totally compatible with the Bootstrap CSS framework.
Routing System
Laravel enables programmers to adopt a routing approach which is both simple and easy. Developers are simply required to create the appropriate directory for each URI, and create links to various named routes while writing PHP code. Laravel automatically inserts the URI based on link to named route and also update the routes automatically whenever they change.
App Structure
The default Laravel app structure is easy to use and is made to offer an easy and convenient starting point for big and small size applications. One could organize the app exactly in the way they like easily.
Helper functions
Laravel includes various helper PHP functions. It is to be noted that several of the functions are used by Laravel itself. On the other hand, the helper PHP functions, could be used easily in the apps for free if they are suitable.
Blade Templates
The framework provides Blade, a powerful and simple templating engine. In sharp contrast to various popular PHP templating engines, Blade does not limit one from using plain PHP code in the views. All Blade views are collated to plain PHP code and then cached until they’re modified.
Artisan CLI
Artisan Command-Line-Interface is yet another key element of Laravel. You can create code-blocks, database migrations, seeders, events, listeners, controllers, models, and what not with just a single magical artisan command.
You can see a list of command by typing in php artisan in your project root.
Conclusion
Thus with a range of great features, Laravel has outshined most of the popular frameworks of PHP. Clearly it is the winner and will remain so in the coming years. Laravel is simple to make an application, build an API or setup a simple website and the code is straightforward and easily readable.
You may read more about Laravel at the official docs or if you're more of a visual person, you may head over to laracasts.
