What is Laravel?

Discussing the laravel first we go through about Framework and what Framework does?

A framework is an abstraction in which they provides generic and conceptual structure for creating something useful and can be customized or overridden by user written code. The framework provides the code for establishes the application that knows “what” to do, but don’t know about “How” to do it, so this specific function (“How”) put into systematic way by the programmer.

The framework does several things:

• Framework makes development of application faster and help to make resource better.
• Provide testing and debugging of code more easily.
• Provide scalability of application.
• Framework provides the model view controller (MVC) pattern for maintains the code.

What is Laravel?

Laravel is an open source php framework based on the model view controller (MVC) pattern. Laravel is highly used framework in comparison to other php framework such as Symfony, Cake php, Code Igniter and Zend Framework because of laravel has massive community over there. It is developed by Taylor Otwell, intended to make code easier and reduce the development cost.

Laravel take the pain out of web development by easing the task of web projects, such as injection container, routing, mail validation, cache storage, session and real time event broadcasting. Laravel has its own architecture, which provide to developers to make application easier and create own infrastructure.

A benefit of Laravel is accessible, powerful and provides tools required for large, robust applications. It is used for both big and small project.

First version Laravel 1.0 release on June 2011. In Feb 26th 2019 Laravel introduced new version of Laravel 5.8.

#Laravel 5.8

Laravel 5.8 introduced the improvement made in Laravel 5.7 by introducing the several things:

• Eloquent hasOneThrough Relationship.
• Improved Email Validation
• Auto-Discovery Of Model Policies
• DynamoDB Cache / Session Drivers
• PSR-16 Cache Driver Compliance
• Multiple Broadcast Authentication Guards
• Token Guard Token Hashing
• Default Scheduler Timezone
• Carbon 2.0 Support
• Pheanstalk 4.0 Support
• Artisan Serve Improvements
• PHPUnit 8.0 Support

Laravel 5.8 fixes the variety of bug and improved the usability.

Note: “Laravel provided the thorough documentation and video tutorial library of all modern web application. To learn about laravel, “Laracasts” contain 1518 video tutorial on the range of topics including laravel, modern Php, unit testing & Java Scripts”.

Key Features:

Routing

For defining the routes Laravel providing basic and expressive method. The routes accept a URL and a closure. All routes are defined in your route files, which are located in the routes directory by framework automatically.

Service Container

This service container is essential used for building powerful, large application and as well as for contributing laravel core itself. And this is a tool for managing class dependencies and performing injection; Dependency injection is a fancy phrase that means “this” which provides benefits of to swap implementation of the injected class; where class dependencies “injected” into the class via the constructor or “setter” methods.

Multiple Back-ends

Laravel ships with a range of session and cache back-ends and provides an expressive, unified API for session and caching back-ends. Laravel also supports popular backends like Memcached and Redis.

Eloquent ORM

Currently Laravel supports four databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite and SQL Server. But Laravel makes databases extremely simple with interacting with variety of database backends using either raw SQL, the Query builder and the Eloquent ORM.
Eloquent ORM (object relational mapping) provides a simple ActiveRecord, beautiful and expressive implementation for working with your database. Each database table has a corresponding “Model” which is used to interact and allow querying for data in your table.

Query Builder

In your web application query builder used to perform databases operations and work on all supported database systems. It provides the convenient, fluent interface to creating and running database queries. Laravel query builder uses the PHP Data Object (PDO) parameter binding to protect application form SQL injection attacks.

Pagination

In comparison to other framework, pagination is excruciating. Laravel paginator is integrated with the Query builder and Eloquent ORM which provides the convenient, easy-to-use pagination of database results out of the box and paginator.

Testing

Laravel is built with to keep testing in mind. Laravel already set up the phpunit.xml file for your application. In Laravel, by defaults your application’s tests directory contains two directories: Feature and Unit. Where Feature tests focus on larger portion of your code while Unit tests focus on a very small, isolated portion of your code.

Broadcasting

Laravel assist you in building realtime, live-updating user interface; by make it easy to “broadcast” your event over a Web Socket connection. Broadcasting your Laravel events allows you to share the same event name between server-side code and client-side application. While in modern web application, when some data is updated on the server-side, a message is typically sent over a Web Socket connection to be handled by the client.

File System

Using the third party php package “Flysystem” laravel provides a powerful file system abstraction, simple to use drivers for working with local file systems, Amazon S3 and Rackspace cloud storage.

Agnostic Migration

In laravel, migration paired with laravel schema builder. Which provide you to easily build your application’s database schema. Laravel migration solve the problem of add column manually to their local database schema. The Laravel schema “facade” provides database agnostic support for creating and manipulating tables across all of Laravel supported database systems.

Queues

Laravel queues provide a unified API across a variety of different queue backend service such as Beanstalk, Amazon SQS, Redis, or even relational database. Queues allow deferring the processing of a time consuming task, such as sending an email, until a later time. In Laravel the configuration files of queue stored in “config/queue.php”. Where you will find the connection for each backend services.