Over the past years, PHP has been one of the most used programming languages for websites and web applications and with the advancement of PHP to its version >7.0, there are many improved features that call for using PHP. Vanilla PHP is still good as it gives flexibility and customizability, however, it lacks some of the key features that are required by business applications and Enterprise Web Application. In order to resolve such issues, we have a fleet of PHP based frameworks for web development and Laravel is the best one to choose in 2018.
In this article, we will discuss some of the laravel framework importance that makes it a better choice for web artisans.
1. Customization at its best
The first and foremost laravel framework importance is Customization that allows any developer to customize the application to its fullest. This technology has everything needed to turn any business idea into a reality by having a successful and powerful tool. Although Laravel comes with pre-designed packages, they all can be customized to suit your specific business needs. Since you are the sole controller of the structure, you can be confident of the best results from Laravel framework.
2. Stability
When developing applications for businesses, you need to make sure the version you are using is stable and tested by the core developers so that you don’t encounter surprises along the way. It has been a constantly evolving framework and newer versions are released around 2 times in a year. As of this writing, version 5.6 is the current stable version. They also provide LTS where bug fixes are provided for 2 years and security fixes are provided for 3 years.
3. Scalability and Expandability
This is one of the best laravel framework importance that I admire. In the real world, you may never know when your application will start being used by many people because businesses evolve at a very rapid rate and we as developers have the responsibility to support that business no matter what the scale is. With laravel, you can architect your application for scalability. We at Zignuts, develop highly scalable and fault-tolerant applications with Laravel using Amazon AWS. If you are looking for consultation and development on how to make your application scalable, contact us now.
4. Well Documented
The Laravel provides a very clean, understandable and well-organized documentation with ample examples. You can learn about almost all the features provided by Laravel in a very easy and implementable approach.
5. Rapid Development
Laravel enables you to have a rapid development cycle. Developers won’t need to spend much time on creating deeply customized solutions for entrepreneurs and businesses. This has become possible due to a considerable set of helpers and libraries that Laravel comes with. With a very large set of libraries and components, you can easily work in the Agile environment by releasing features quite frequently.
6. Database Seeding and Migrations
This helps the developers by creating the dummy test data in the database. Developers can use this feature for testing the API or web services. A library called Faker is used to seed the database with the test/dummy data, or, you can also say, ‘Fake’ data. Migration can be seen as the code type representation of your database schema. Migrations are like version control for your database, allowing your team to easily modify and share the application’s database schema. Migrations are typically paired with Laravel’s schema builder to easily build your application’s database schema. Thus, you can achieve a level of database consistency across the entire team.
7. Eloquent — The ORM
The most powerful ORM that can work with a collection of different databases. The Eloquent ORM included with Laravel provides a beautiful, simple ActiveRecord implementation for working with your database. Each database table has a corresponding “Model” which is used to interact with that table. Models allow you to query for data in your tables, as well as insert new records into the table. This is very effective when you want to build an application with hundreds of tables and relationships. With Eloquent, you can write very clean and clutter-free code to interact with the database.
8. Authentication and Authorization
Laravel provides some out-of-the-box utilities for implementing authentication. The framework provides an easy way to organize authorization logic and control access to all resources. Thus, a web application owner can be sure that access to secured resources won’t be granted to unauthorized users. It also provides several best practices for managing the authorization data.
9. Data and Software Security
Laravel comes pre-built with most of the security best practices and features. I want to write a separate article on this point as it is very crucial for any business to prevent the system against unauthorized access and vulnerabilities while securing the underlying data of users and business processes. Apart from the authentication and authorization feature explained above, Laravel also provides features to protect your web applications against SQL injection, Cross-site scripting (XSS), Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) and many others.
10. Ecosystem
Laravel has the most powerful tools, components, built-in libraries and third-party libraries that create a complete ecosystem. The developer need not worry about implementing any feature in Laravel, be it a payment gateway with Laravel Cashier, API authentication with Laravel Passport, full-text search with Laravel Scout, social media integration, and OAuth using Laravel Socialite and many others. With such nice components, you only need to worry about the best features you can give to empower any business and leverage the full power of integrated web applications.
