Introduction to Laravel

If You have been interested in web development, You must probably have heard about Laravel. So what’s it ? Why is it so popular and why the demand in the market for Laravel Developers is so high? Stick with this article and You will find out.

First of all, let’s mention, that Laravel is an open-source web framework implementing the MVC pattern. The last sentence did not make any sense to you, right ?

Open-source means that there is no person or corporation that “owns” the product, so it is a product “owned” by the community. Anyone can “make a copy” of the software and use it with no charge or restriction, or even can create a different version of the initial software and re-sell it for profit. To better understand the meaning of open-source let’s take an example of operating systems. As the most of us know, the most popular operating systems nowadays now are Linux, Windows and MacOS. You may think that there are other systems, like “Ubuntu” or “CentOS”, which are widely used as well, but we didn’t mention. That’s because those are modified “copies” of initial Linux version under other names. Linux is an open-source operating system, so any person (who at least has some programming knowledge) can modify the system core and publish it as a new operating system under his/her own name, while Windows and MacOS are closed-sourced, i.e. they are owned by Microsoft and Apple companies respectively.

Let’s check what “framework” means. There is a common phrase “Re-inventing the bicycle”, and the purpose of a “framework” (sometimes may be called packages or libraries) is to give the developer already designed functions which could aid the development process significantly. When creating a web application, whether it will be a simple contact-page website or a multi-layer enterprise application, we will need to create a ton of functionalities that are repetitive and kind-of “boring”, such as ‘authorization’ of the user, the application ‘security’ including XSS and CSRF protections, hashing, sending of the mail, connecting to databases and managing database information etc. A framework gives a lot of tools that can ease the development process and help the developer launch the application in a shorter period of time.

So that you already know what “open-source” and “framework” means, let’s check what is the “MVC Pattern”. Pattern or “Design Pattern” in software development is considered a common, usually best solution for a common tasks. Initially there were about 30 design patterns, grouped under 3 “categories”, but nowadays the number of design patterns has increased drastically. MVC is a design pattern, that was initially introduced in web applications development by Microsoft as a web application framework back in 2009 and was one of ASP.NET’s default application templates. MVC is abbreviation and stands for Model-View-Controller, which will be discussed later in this article.

Main reasons why Laravel is favored by so many developers is that it has a great documentation and it has a huge community, so You would be able to find answers for any problems in no time. Reading it’s documentation gives an awesome fundamental knowledge for beginners, and makes learning easy and enjoyable.

One of the many benefits of using a framework is having various solutions for common problems, that will boost the application security drastically.

Let’s list why we love Laravel the most:

• the default application structure comes pre-configured for csrf protection
• uses PDO statements for preventing SQL injections
• implements ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) technique for interacting with databases,
• uses composer for dependency management
• beautifully handles dependency injection
• uses service providers for registering components during application bootstrapping
• gives a really nice way for managing application urls with routing
• has built-in templating engine “blade”, which results in a unique and developer-friendly syntax
• provides every necessary tool for writing test cases and unit tests
• works well when creating a multilingual application

This list only includes a small part of benefits and awesome features that gives You Laravel framework.

Stay tuned to our blog to learn more about Laravel, learn more about tools and techniques You can use for improving Your development process and much more.