What Is Laravel?

Laravel is a free open-source PHP framework. It provides web developers tools and resources for building modern PHP web applications.

Written by Artturi Jalli
Published on Dec. 21, 2022
Image: Shutterstock / Built In
Image: Shutterstock / Built In
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Laravel has useful built-in features like the Artisan command-line interface (CLI), native authentication and model-view-controller (MVC) architecture. These features make the framework easy to use and are the main reason for its popularity.

Laravel is a trendy web framework. It has more than 70,000 stars on GitHub and has become an in-demand skill on the job market. 

Is Laravel Front End or Back End?

Laravel is a popular PHP-based back-end framework and comes with the features necessary to build modern web apps at scale. These features include routing, validation and file storage.

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What Is Laravel Used For?

Laravel is an easy-to-use web framework that will help you create extensible PHP-based websites and web applications at scale.

Before creating a web app or website, you need to make a foundational decision as to what technology you are going to use. This is one of the trickiest parts of the web development process.

To build something simple, such as an online store or portfolio, you can rely on no-code website creators. If you are looking to build something more advanced, a no-code solution might not be enough. Instead, you should choose a framework and start writing code on it. Laravel is a good choice as an easy-to-use open-source framework for building modern web applications at scale.

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Benefits of Laravel

Laravel’s first stable release took place in 2011 but didn’t get much attention. When Laravel 3 came out in 2012, it started to gain some hype thanks to its new features, such as Artisan CLI. Here are a few notable Laravel features that make it such a popular PHP framework among web developers.

 

MVC Architecture

Laravel framework promotes the MVC architectural pattern for creating web apps. This pattern specifies a set of rules that specify how to build scalable and maintainable web apps.

The Laravel MVC pattern helps developers bring order and consistency to unstructured code. The MVC approach also makes it easy to develop both small and large-scale web applications.

 

Artisan CLI

Laravel uses Artisan as a CLI that helps web developers to:

  • Migrate data
  • Manage databases
  • Generate boilerplate code, controllers, models and more

The Artisan CLI makes web development easier thanks to code generation and database management features that are only a few commands away. Instead of writing boilerplate code or setting up a database, a developer can focus on building the app’s logic.

 

Built-In Authentication

Laravel comes with a out-of-the-box solutions for authentication and authorization. With a couple of Artisan commands, you can set up  reliable and robust authentication and authorization for your web app.

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Blade Template Engine

The Blade Template Engine is a powerful tool that comes with Laravel. You can use the Blade to:

  • Connect data models
  • Process application code inside template tags
  • Divert output to a text file or other streams

Thanks to these features, Blade makes development quicker and more convenient.

 

Eloquent ORM

Eloquent object-relational mapper (ORM) is a database management tool that comes as a part of the Laravel framework.

Eloquent makes it easy to interact with a database. With Eloquent, every database table has a corresponding model you can use to interact with the table. Besides retrieving records from the table, an Eloquent model enables inserting, updating and deleting records.

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Redis

Redis is a key-value store that’s also referred to as a data structure server because it supports data types like strings, hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets.

Laravel supports the use of Redis as a cache for temporary data storage. Caching data to Redis speeds up database queries and feedback, which makes data retrieval quicker. This, in turn, makes your web applications run faster.

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