What is Laravel and its Features

Laravel is one of the most popular and widely used open-source frameworks today. Laravel is a PHP MVC framework that offers a standardized and feature-packed platform for high performing PHP web application development.

What is Laravel

Laravel is a free. open-source PHP based Web Framework for building High-End Web Applications, following the Model View Controller architectural pattern and based on Symfony.
It is created by Taylor Otwell.

Laravel offers a rich set of functionalities which incorporates the basic features of PHP frameworks like CodeIgniter, Yii and other programming languages like Ruby on Rails. Laravel has a very rich set of features which will boost the speed of web development.

Advantages of Laravel

Open Source
Collection of tools
Save Time
Improve Prodctivity
Robust and Easy
Security of the Application
Authentication
Routing
Templating

Requirement of Learining Laravel

HTML
CSS
JavaScript
SQL
PHP OOP
MVC
Composer

If you are familiar with Core PHP and Advanced PHP, Laravel will make your task easier. It saves a lot time if you are planning to develop a website from scratch. Moreover, a website built in Laravel is secure and prevents several web attacks.

Laravel Requirements

PHP 7.2.0 or Higher
XAMPP (Apache + MariaDB + PHP + Perl)
WAMP/LAMP/MAMP
Composer
Text/Code Editior – Notepad++, VS COde, ATOM, Brackets
Web Browser – Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Edge

Features of Laravel

Authentication
Authentication is the most important factor in a web application, and developers need to spend a lot of time writing the authentication code. Laravel makes a simpler authentication when Laravel is updated to Laravel 5. Laravel contains an inbuilt authentication system, you only need to configure models, views, and controllers to make the application work.

Innovative Template Engine
Laravel provides an innovative template engine that allows the developers to create a dynamic website. The available widgets in Laravel can be used to create solid structures for an application.

Effective ORM
Laravel contains an inbuilt ORM with easy PHP Active Record implementation. An effective ORM allows the developers to query the database tables by using the simple PHP syntax without writing any SQL code. It provides easy integration between the developers and database tables by giving each of the tables with their corresponding models.

MVC Architecture Support
Laravel supports MVC architecture. It provides a faster development process as in MVC; one programmer can work on the view while other is working on the controller to create the business logic for the web application. It provides multiple views for a model, and code duplication is also avoided as it separates the business logic from the presentation logic.

Secure Migration System
Laravel framework can expand the database without allowing the developers to put much effort every time to make changes, and the migration process of Laravel is very secure and full-proof. In the whole process, php code is used rather than SQL code.

Unique Unit-testing
Laravel provides a unique unit-testing. Laravel framework can run several test cases to check whether the changes harm the web app or not. In Laravel, developers can also write the test cases in their own code.

Intact Security
Application security is one of the most important factors in web application development. While developing an application, a programmer needs to take effective ways to secure the application. Laravel has an inbuilt web application security, i.e., it itself takes care of the security of an application. It uses the “Bcrypt Hashing Algorithm” to generate the salted password means that the password is saved as an encrypted password in a database, not in the form of a plain text.

Libraries and Modular
Laravel is very popular as some Object-oriented libraries, and pre-installed libraries are added in this framework, these pre-installed libraries are not added in other PHP frameworks. One of the most popular libraries is an authentication library that contains some useful features such as password reset, monitoring active users, Bcrypt hashing, and CSRF protection. This framework is divided into several modules that follow the PHP principles allowing the developers to build responsive and modular apps.

Artisan
Laravel framework provides a built-in tool for a command-line known as Artisan that performs the repetitive programming tasks that do not allow the PHP developers to perform manually. These artisans can also be used to create the skeleton code, database structure, and their migration, so it makes it easy to manage the database of the system. It also generates the MVC files through the command line. Artisan also allows the developers to create their own commands.

This framework gained more popularity after the release of version 3, which included features like Command Line Interface called Artisan, Support for the Database system and migrations. It also introduced a packaging system called bundles.