What is Laravel?

Intro 🚀

Laravel is a super sweet PHP framework; it's not a CMS (Content Management System). It provides a well-organized and efficient structure for your application.

Building a web app with Laravel is a breeze, as the framework is loaded with features that give you out-of-the-box functionalities common to most applications. For example, it has a very powerful ORM (Object Relational Mapper) that makes complex queries very simple to implement. You will fall in love with that ORM when we get to use it.

"Happiness at every step from local deployment to shipping to production"

I love how Laravel takes away from developers the complexities involved in building web apps, such as authentication, authorization, queuing, and so on, and leaves you to focus only on the essential logic of your application.

Why Choose Laravel?

For all the ease, efficiency, and security it offers, why not? You should choose Laravel because it's:

1. Progressive. It grows with you or as your technical skill grows. If your skills are young you can use Laravel and still get good results out of it. If you are an experienced developer you can access even more features and build powerful and robust applications.

2. Scalable. It grows with the needs of your application due to the scaling-friendly nature of PHP and the design of the framework.

3. Mature. It offers tools and an ecosystem that is mature. Tools built as part of the Laravel ecosystem are very professional. Think of Laravel Jetstream, Livewire, Herd, etc.

4. Fast. It supercharges the speed at which applications are built due to its various built-in supports that reduce the time and complexity of building modern applications.

Cool Features 😎

Let me share with you some features I like in Laravel and get you pumped up for the next article. Here we go:

1. Artisan Command-Line Tool. Laravel takes command line interfaces to an unforeseen level with the artisan command. Do you want to create a controller? There is an artisan command that does so for you. Do you want to create a migration that creates more than one table at once in your database? There is an artisan command for that. Do you want to create a model for a table? There is an artisan command for that. Do you want to generate routes with different methods for your view? There is an artisan command for that. The list goes on. Along with the files, boilerplate codes are also generated.

2. Built-in Authentication. Laravel has awesome out-of-the-box, authentication features such as session management, password reset, registration, access control, and more. Laravel keeps track of authenticated users for you and gives you helpers to work with the authenticated user data.

3. Blade Templating Engine. A simple, yet powerful templating engine that allows you to use plain PHP code in your views while keeping them clean and manageable. And the fun part is that it does not look complex as the structure is very similar to everyday html.

4. Pagination. Laravel can paginate your data with 2 lines of code. It generates for you, elegant-looking customizable pagination links. It also handles the next and previous logic for you 🔥. It's the framework with the simplest pagination system.

Wrap

There are many other features, such as the built-in queuing system and middleware. If you'd like to know more check out the official Laraval documentation at Laravel.com.

Yes, Laravel has some weaknesses. Because I want to keep this article very short, I'll state one disadvantage of Laravel. It's an overkill for small projects. The file structure of Laravel has many parts that you probably will not use for small apps. It will be a waste and will make the app complicated to manage with lots of unnecessary files.

Summary

Think of this: how good are you at building secure or efficient applications? Imagine you can pay a professional in that field to work on the security of your application and build methods, functions, and classes that make your app more efficient. Imagine you can do the same for all complex logic that is common to all web apps. That's Laravel for you, but it does so for free.

That's it! Thanks for reading. ❤️

See you in the next article.🚀