All You Need to Know About the PHP Laravel Framework

What is Laravel?

Laravel is a web application framework that is available to the PHP web developers under an open-source license and is offered free of cost. This framework is mainly designed to support the development of web applications based on the MVC (Model View Controller) model. It has been termed as the most popular framework among the PHP developers, followed by Symfony2, CodeIgniter, Phalcon and others. This framework offers a wide range of tools and features and is backed by a huge community of developers and enthusiasts. In this article, we’ll explain why many businesses prefer to work with Laravel experts to develop robust applications using this framework.

Why Choose Laravel? Unpacking the Benefits of This Powerful PHP Framework

Laravel has become the go-to PHP framework for countless developers and businesses worldwide, and for good reason. It offers a compelling blend of developer convenience, robust security features, a vibrant community, and a rich ecosystem of tools.

Bundle of features and functionalities make Laravel an excellent choice for building modern, scalable web applications, including sophisticated eCommerce platforms. You can outsource Laravel development to save bucks without compromising quality for your business solutions.

Let’s delve deeper into why Laravel stands out:

Developer-Friendly: Accelerating Development with Elegance and Efficiency

Laravel is renowned for its elegant syntax and intuitive structure, significantly reducing development time and making code more maintainable. Key features that contribute to this developer-friendly experience include:

• Artisan CLI: This powerful command-line interface provides a suite of helpful commands that automate repetitive tasks, such as generating boilerplate code for controllers, models, and migrations. Artisan streamlines workflows and allows developers to focus on the unique aspects of their application.
• Blade Templating Engine: Blade is Laravel’s simple yet powerful templating engine. It allows developers to write clean and concise views using template inheritance and helpful directives, making it easy to create dynamic web pages with minimal code.
• Eloquent ORM (Object-Relational Mapper): Eloquent provides an elegant and expressive way to interact with databases. Instead of writing raw SQL queries, developers can use PHP objects to perform database operations, making database interactions more intuitive, secure, and efficient.

Secure by Design: Building Robust Applications with Confidence

Security is paramount in today’s digital landscape, especially for eCommerce sites handling sensitive user data and financial transactions. Laravel incorporates several built-in features to protect applications from common web vulnerabilities:

• CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) Protection: Laravel automatically generates and validates CSRF tokens for each user session, preventing malicious third-party websites from making unauthorized requests on behalf of authenticated users.
• SQL Injection Prevention: By leveraging Eloquent ORM and parameterized queries, Laravel helps prevent SQL injection attacks, a common vulnerability where malicious SQL code is inserted into database queries to gain unauthorized access or manipulate data.
• Hashed Passwords: Laravel provides a secure and convenient way to hash and verify user passwords using the bcrypt algorithm, a strong hashing function that makes it significantly harder for attackers to crack stolen passwords.

Community Power: Leveraging Collective Wisdom and Support

When you hire remote Laravel developers, you have an advantage of the best community for your project. Your offshore developers won’t have issues to solve glitches, if any. Laravel boasts one of the largest and most active developer communities in the PHP world. This vibrant ecosystem offers numerous benefits:

• Thousands of Contributors: A large and active community means that the framework is constantly being improved, with new features, bug fixes, and security updates being contributed regularly.
• Active Forums and Resources: Developers can easily find help, share knowledge, and collaborate through numerous online forums, tutorials, and community-driven packages. This extensive support network makes it easier to learn Laravel and troubleshoot any issues that may arise.

Rich Ecosystem: Extending Functionality with Powerful Tools and Services

Beyond the core framework, Laravel offers a comprehensive ecosystem of first-party packages and services that extend its capabilities and simplify common development tasks:

• Forge: A platform for deploying and managing Laravel applications on various cloud providers, simplifying server provisioning, deployment, and scaling.
• Nova: A beautifully designed administration panel for Laravel applications, providing a powerful and intuitive interface for managing data.
• Vapor: A serverless deployment platform for Laravel, leveraging AWS Lambda to provide scalable and cost-effective hosting.
• Mix: A powerful asset compilation tool that simplifies the process of working with CSS and JavaScript, including features like Sass, Less, and Webpack integration.

Laravel means opting for a framework that prioritizes developer experience, security, community support, and extensibility. This powerful combination empowers developers to build sophisticated, secure, and scalable eCommerce platforms efficiently and with confidence.

Laravel vs Other Frameworks

Laravel stands out with its elegant tools and flexibility, making it ideal for both small and enterprise-level applications.

Laravel Ecosystem is More Than Just a Framework

Laravel’s strength extends far beyond its core code; it’s a thriving ecosystem of tightly integrated tools and services designed to streamline every stage of offshore web development lifecycle, from initial setup to ongoing deployment and management.

These official packages significantly enhance developer productivity and application robustness:

Forge – Your Cloud Server Command Center

Think of Forge as a user-friendly control panel for your servers. It simplifies the often complex tasks of server provisioning, deployment, and management across popular cloud providers like AWS, DigitalOcean, and Linode. Forge automates server configuration, PHP installation, database setup, and even SSL certificate management, allowing you to focus on your application code rather than server administration.

Envoyer – Seamless, Zero-Downtime Deployments

Deploying updates to a live website can be a nerve-wracking process. Envoyer eliminates the anxiety by providing a sophisticated system for zero-downtime deployments. It intelligently manages the deployment process, ensuring that your new code is rolled out without any interruption to your users’ experience. This is crucial for maintaining uptime and a professional image, especially for active eCommerce sites.

Nova – Crafting Elegant Admin Panels with Ease

Building a powerful and intuitive administration panel is often a time-consuming but necessary task. Nova provides a beautifully designed and highly customizable admin interface builder for your Laravel applications. With minimal coding, you can create sophisticated dashboards, manage your application’s data models, define relationships, and implement custom actions, saving countless development hours.

Vapor – Unleashing Serverless Scalability on AWS

For applications that demand high scalability and cost-efficiency, Vapor offers a seamless way to deploy and run your Laravel applications on AWS Lambda. This serverless platform handles infrastructure management automatically, allowing your application to scale effortlessly based on demand while only charging you for the actual compute time used. Vapor simplifies the complexities of serverless architecture, making it accessible to Laravel developers.

Laravel Mix – Effortless Asset Compilation for Modern Frontends

Modern web applications rely heavily on front-end assets like CSS and JavaScript. Laravel Mix simplifies the often intricate process of compiling these assets. It provides a clean and intuitive API for working with popular tools like Webpack, allowing you to easily process Sass, Less, JavaScript modules, and more, optimizing your front-end for performance and developer convenience.

Security Features of Laravel for Fortifying Your Application from the Ground Up

Laravel doesn’t treat security as an afterthought; it’s deeply ingrained within the framework’s architecture, providing developers with robust, out-of-the-box defenses against common web vulnerabilities. These core security features empower you to build more secure and trustworthy applications:

Automatic CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) Token Generation

Laravel intelligently generates unique, hidden tokens for each active user session and form submission. This mechanism acts as a crucial safeguard against CSRF attacks, where malicious third-party websites attempt to trick authenticated users into performing unintended actions on your application. Laravel’s middleware automatically verifies these tokens on each request, ensuring that the action originated from a legitimate user session.

Robust SQL Injection Protection Through Prepared Statements

Laravel’s Eloquent ORM, the primary way to interact with databases, inherently utilizes PDO (PHP Data Objects) prepared statements. This crucial technique separates SQL code structure from user-provided data. By sending the SQL query to the database server first and then binding the user inputs as parameters, Laravel effectively prevents malicious SQL code from being injected into the query and compromising your database.

Industry-Standard Password Hashing with Bcrypt and Argon2

When handling sensitive user credentials like passwords, Laravel provides secure and easy-to-use hashing mechanisms. By default, it utilizes the bcrypt hashing algorithm, a widely respected and computationally intensive algorithm that makes it extremely difficult for attackers to crack stolen passwords even if they gain access to the database. Laravel also offers support for the more modern and potentially even more secure Argon2 algorithm, providing flexibility for different security requirements.

Built-in Rate Limiting and Authentication Scaffolding

Laravel provides convenient tools to protect your application from brute-force attacks and simplify the implementation of secure authentication. The rate limiting feature allows you to control the number of requests a user (or IP address) can make within a specific timeframe, mitigating attempts to overwhelm your server or guess login credentials. Furthermore, Laravel offers pre-built authentication scaffolding, generating the necessary routes, controllers, and views for user registration, login, and password reset, all while adhering to security best practices.

Laravel significantly reduces the burden on developers to implement these critical safeguards from scratch by incorporating these security features directly into its core. This contributes to the development of more secure and reliable web applications.

How to install PHP Laravel framework

The process of this framework’s installation is an easy method that requires you to follow some simple steps only. Since Laravel uses Composer for an easy management of its dependencies, so you need to download the ‘composer.phar’ archive, which you can move to the directory ‘usr/local/bin’ for a global use or kept back in your project’s local directory. Windows installer for the Composer is available for installation of the framework on Windows platform.

There are several different methods available to choose the desired one for installing this framework as discussed below.

• Via Laravel Installer: Begin by downloading the PHAR archive for the Laravel installer and then move the same to the directory ‘/usr/local/bin’. After installation, use the ‘laravel new’ command to create a fresh installation in a desired directory, for instance, run the command ‘laravel new blog’ to use “blog” directory. This method is quicker than the one using the Composer.
• Via Composer Create-Project: To install this framework via the Composer, issue the command ‘create-project’ in the terminal as “composer create-project laravel/laravel –prefer-dist”.
• Via Download: After getting the Composer installed, get Laravel framework’s latest version and extract all its contents on your server. Now, in your Laravel application’s root, execute the command “php composer.phar install” to install all the framework’s dependencies. For a successful completion of the installation, you need to install Git on the server. However, the command “php composer.phar update” should be executed to update the framework.

Thus, you can install the framework easily by following any of the above-discussed methods, where no configuration is required to start developing, but you can configure different options to suit the needs of your application.

Performance Optimization Tips for Building High-Performance Laravel Applications

Crafting a responsive and efficient application is crucial for a positive user experience and optimal scalability. Laravel provides several powerful tools and techniques to significantly boost your application’s performance:

Leverage Route and Configuration Caching

Laravel spends time on each request parsing your route definitions and loading configuration files. By using Artisan commands to cache these, you drastically reduce the overhead on subsequent requests.

• Route Caching: Use php artisan route:cache to compile your routes into a single, optimized file. Remember to run php artisan route:clear whenever you modify your routes/web.php or routes/api.php files.
• Configuration Caching: Use php artisan config:cache to combine all your configuration files into a single cached file. Run php artisan config:clear after making changes to your configuration files in the config/ directory or your .env file.

Employ Queued Jobs for Asynchronous Processing

For tasks that don’t require an immediate response (like sending emails, processing large data sets, or generating reports), utilize Laravel’s robust queue system. By pushing these tasks onto a queue, your web requests can be handled much faster, improving perceived performance and preventing bottlenecks. Laravel supports various queue drivers like database, Redis, and Beanstalkd.

Implement Redis or Memcached for Accelerated Caching

Laravel offers excellent support for popular in-memory data stores like Redis and Memcached. These caching systems store frequently accessed data in RAM, allowing for significantly faster retrieval compared to hitting the database repeatedly. Use them to cache database query results, session data, and other frequently used information to dramatically reduce database load and improve response times.

Minify Assets with Laravel Mix

The size of your CSS and JavaScript files can significantly impact page load times. Laravel Mix, built on top of Webpack, provides a simple and elegant way to minify and bundle your front-end assets. Minification removes unnecessary characters (like whitespace and comments) from your CSS and JS files, reducing their size and leading to faster downloads for your users. Use the npm run production command with Laravel Mix to generate optimized, production-ready assets.

Why is the PHP Laravel framework considered to be the best?

Laravel has been found to be the most excellent framework for PHP developers as compared to others, where different reasons supporting this statement are discussed below:

• Composer: The version 4 of this framework is largely dependent on several external packages to function properly, for which, Composer is used as the dependency manager. Setting up a new project is quite easier for beginners, where there is no need to download a zip file and remember a URL. All you need to do is to execute a couple of commands to set up the project as well as get all the required dependencies.
• Artisan: Since command line is a great tool for developers, Artisan allows the use of command line to execute several tasks by expanding the framework. You gain access to multiple options, when you type ‘php artisan’ in the terminal window. Though only a few commands are available, you can start making personalized command line tools to suit your needs.
• Database Migrations & Seeds: Synchronization of database among different development machines is a hectic task, where database migrations from Laravel make this process quite easier. The work keeps synchronized across all the development machines as long as it is kept in the migrations and seeds.
• RESTful Routing: This is one among the best reasons that supports Laravel, where the use of verbs for routed is done in a very nice manner.

These are only a few reasons that support Laravel framework for its immense popularity and make it’s the best choice for different applications. Several other reasons include IoC, Eloquent, Blade Templates and Testing.

Features of Laravel Framework

Built on many mature and strong software design patterns, Laravel is provided with a number of features, where intuitive API is the main attraction making its use an absolute pleasure.

Several features of this tool are listed as below:

• Remarkable routing facilities
• Elegant and one of its type object-relational mapper, Eloquent
• Use of a great templating engine, Blade, for convenient and easy templating with Laravel
• Marvelous documentation and support of an active community
• Amazing testing facilities to ensure the desired output from apps
• Composer powered modular architecture, allowing easy building of less coupled and scalable apps
• Rock-solid foundation that is built with the basis of several battle-tested Symfony components
• An amazing CLI of Laravel, Artisan helps with project management, database migrations and more, including the creation of personalized commands as well.

Laravel in Real-World Use Cases

Laravel’s versatility and robust feature set make it a compelling choice for a wide array of applications across various industries, including:

eCommerce

Building robust backends with secure payment processing, managing product catalogs, handling orders, and integrating with shipping and inventory systems.

Healthcare

Developing HIPAA-compliant solutions, managing patient data securely (often leveraging Laravel Sanctum for API authentication), appointment scheduling systems, and telemedicine platforms.

SaaS Products

Architecting scalable multi-tenant applications using features like database migrations, queue systems (often with Laravel Vapor for serverless deployments), and billing integrations.

Complex Web Portals

Laravel’s organizational structure and routing capabilities are ideal for building intricate web portals for organizations, offering different levels of access and functionalities for various user roles (e.g., customer portals, employee dashboards, partner platforms).

Content Management Systems (CMS)

While there are dedicated CMS platforms, Laravel’s flexibility allows developers to build highly customized and feature-rich CMS solutions tailored to specific content needs and workflows, offering more control than off-the-shelf options.

RESTful APIs for Mobile and Single-Page Applications (SPAs)

Laravel excels at building robust and well-documented RESTful APIs that can power mobile applications (iOS and Android) and modern JavaScript-based SPAs (like those built with Vue.js, React, or Angular). Laravel Sanctum provides a seamless authentication solution for these scenarios.

Social Networking Platforms

The framework’s scalability and features like user authentication, relationship management, and real-time communication integration (using tools like Laravel Echo and WebSockets) make it a strong foundation for building social networking applications.

Fintech Applications

Laravel’s security features, coupled with its ability to handle complex data and integrations with various financial APIs, make it a viable option for developing fintech solutions, although stringent compliance and security audits are always paramount.

Education Platforms (LMS)

Laravel’s modularity and features for user management, content delivery, and progress tracking are well-suited for building Learning Management Systems (LMS) for online courses and educational institutions.

Business Intelligence and Analytics Dashboards

Laravel can be used to build interactive and data-rich dashboards that visualize key business metrics and insights, often integrating with various data sources and utilizing charting libraries.

Custom CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Systems

Businesses with unique needs outsource Laravel development for their business solutions as the platform offers flexibility to customize CRM systems that precisely match their sales, marketing, and customer support workflows. Ultimately, Laravel offers advantages over generic CRM solutions.

Awesome Websites Based on the Laravel Framework

Laravel is a gorgeous tool that has helped many website owners to generate a remarkable online presence. A list of few of the sites developed using this framework is provided below, along with a brief description for each.

• Laravel Tricks – Developer community site
• MyRank – Indian EdTech platform
• Deltanet Travel – Tourism booking platform
• Mack Hankins – Personal blog and portfolio
• Invoice Ninja – Open-source invoicing and billing platform for freelancers and businesses.
• Alison – A large global online learning platform offering free courses.
• Barchart – A comprehensive financial data and charting platform for investors and traders.
• Alpha Coders – A platform connecting freelance writers with clients needing their services.
• Laracasts – A popular educational website providing video tutorials for web developers.
• CheckPeople – A service for finding public records and background information.
• World Walking – A website that encourages physical activity through virtual walking challenges.
• Cachet – An open-source status page system for businesses to communicate service outages.

Future of Laravel Framework

There cannot be a second thought to outsource Laravel development for your business website. Not today, even in the future, it is likely to help your business scale. Laravel’s future appears incredibly promising, fueled by its continuous innovation and adaptation to the evolving web development landscape.

The introduction of powerful tools like Livewire, which simplifies the creation of dynamic interfaces with minimal JavaScript; Laravel Octane, which dramatically boosts application performance through server-side application persistence; and Laravel Jetstream, a robust scaffolding package providing essential features like authentication and team management, showcases the framework’s commitment to developer productivity and application speed.

• Livewire: Streamlining the development of dynamic, reactive frontends using primarily PHP, reducing the need for extensive JavaScript coding.
• Laravel Octane: Significantly enhances application performance by keeping the application in memory and reusing it between requests, leading to faster response times.
• Laravel Jetstream: Providing a modern and comprehensive starting point for new applications with built-in features like authentication, two-factor authentication, API support, and team management.
• Continued Focus on Developer Experience: Laravel consistently prioritizes developer satisfaction through its clear syntax, extensive documentation, and helpful tooling.
• Growing Ecosystem: The Laravel ecosystem is constantly expanding with new packages, tools, and services that extend the framework’s capabilities.
• Adoption in Emerging Technologies: Laravel’s flexibility allows it to be integrated with and power aspects of emerging technologies like serverless architectures and real-time applications.
• Strong Community Support: The large and active Laravel community ensures ongoing support, resources, and the continuous sharing of best practices and innovative solutions.
• Adaptability to Modern Web Development Trends: Laravel actively incorporates and adapts to the latest trends and best practices in web development, ensuring its relevance and longevity.

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