Nowadays, if you don’t have a website to promote your business, you are lagging so far behind that you might as well be stuck in the 1990s. Each and every business owner aims to target online users with a professional, top-notch website or web application. To create a high-quality dynamic web application, you need an extremely powerful backend programming language, just like PHP.
Manually writing every line of code in PHP is a laborious task, and that’s where frameworks play a crucial role. Laravel is regarded as one of the best PHP frameworks, significantly streamlining and enhancing the web app development process. If you are interested in learning about the benefits of Laravel along with its use cases and significance, keep on reading.
What is Laravel?
Laravel is an open-source PHP framework designed to simplify and accelerate web application development. By providing robust conventions and reusable components out-of-the-box, Laravel eliminates much of the repetitive and tedious work involved in building custom apps from the ground up.
Benefits and drawbacks of Laravel for web app developers
Understandably, given its ease of access, large community, and support for MVC architecture, Laravel is a well-esteemed framework that is in extremely high demand among PHP developers. Like all other frameworks and languages, however, there are certain advantages and limitations of utilizing Laravel in your web application development project.
Here, I have discussed some of the pros and cons of Laravel to help you make an informed decision:
Advantages of Laravel
- Built-in access control
- Enables rapid development
- Supports MVC architecture
- A broad array of feature-rich packages and resources
- Leverages the most recent and advanced PHP functionalities
Disadvantages of Laravel
- Limited built-in support
- Has a steep learning curve
- Poses certain integration challenges
- Faulty transition between different versions of Laravel
- Migration from legacy systems to Laravel platform is way too complicated
Why is Laravel so popular for web development? – Top 10 features
Over the past years, the usage and acceptance of Laravel have grown tremendously owing to its handful of rich features. Here, I will outline some of the useful features of Laravel primarily behind the popularity of this PHP framework:
1) Ease of use
2) MVC Architecture
3) Open Source
4) Eloquent ORM
5) Robust Security
6) Object-Oriented Libraries
7) Testing
8) Task Scheduling
9) Pre-built Integrations
10) Advanced File System
1) Ease of use:
Laravel is known for its clean, simple, and elegant syntax, which is easy to understand and use. This makes it highly accessible for beginners yet powerful enough for advanced users.
Moreover, Laravel’s intuitive interface and clear documentation simplify the learning process. This ease of use accelerates development, reduces the learning curve, and enhances productivity, making it an ideal choice for web development projects.
2) MVC architecture:
Laravel follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern. This allows for a clear separation of business logic and presentation layers, resulting in organized and manageable code. It promotes cleaner and leaner code, improving application performance and scalability.
The MVC pattern also facilitates better documentation and has multiple built-in functionalities, enhancing the efficiency of the development process.
3) Open source:
Being an open-source framework, Laravel is free to use and has a vast, active community of developers contributing to its constant enhancement and evolution. This ensures that Laravel stays up-to-date with the latest web development trends and technologies.
Consequently, developers can easily find resources, tutorials, and solutions to potential issues, speeding up the development process.
4) Eloquent ORM:
Laravel’s Eloquent Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) provides a simple and intuitive way to interact with your database using object-oriented syntax. It simplifies database operations by allowing developers to write database queries with ORM rather than SQL.
This results in cleaner, more maintainable code and reduces the potential for SQL injection attacks.
5) Robust security:
Protection from cyber-attacks is a crucial part of any software application development project. Laravel offers robust security features to protect web applications from various threats like SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and cross-site request forgery (CSRF).
Laravel’s built-in security features, such as hashed and salted password mechanisms, help ensure your application’s data is secure.
6) Object-oriented libraries:
Laravel comes with several pre-installed, object-oriented libraries, which are not found in many other PHP frameworks. This attribute of Laravel results in the ever-increasing mainstream adoption of this framework.
These libraries, such as the Authentication library, provide ready-to-use, high-level functions that speed up the development process and enhance application capabilities.
7) Testing:
It is pertinent to mention that Laravel is built with testing in mind. It supports testing with PHPUnit out of the box and has a phpunit.xml file already set up for the application.
The framework also includes convenient helper methods allowing for expressive testing of applications, making it easier to manage and conduct unit tests. This significantly improves the application’s functionalities.
8) Task scheduling:
Laravel’s built-in task scheduler allows for the scheduling of periodically executed tasks, such as cleaning up the database or sending out emails. This eliminates the need for external tools to manage task scheduling, thereby increasing overall efficiency.
9) Pre-built integrations:
Laravel supports a variety of pre-built integrations, including popular tools like Redis and Amazon SES, enabling developers to extend an application’s capabilities without having to build these integrations from scratch. This saves development time and ensures the reliability of these integrations.
10) Advanced file system:
Laravel uses the Flysystem PHP package, giving developers a powerful and flexible file system abstraction layer. It supports a variety of cloud-based storage services like Amazon S3, with a simplistic approach for uploading files, allowing for scalable and secure file handling and storage.
Evolution of Laravel – Strengthening with each iteration
Laravel has evolved significantly since its inception in 2011, with frequent releases introducing new features and enhancements. The current stable version, Laravel 10, released in February 2023, exemplifies the framework’s continuous growth and development. Laravel’s popularity has skyrocketed, making Laravel developers highly sought-after professionals in the tech industry.
Laravel’s elegant, expressive syntax also highlights its focus on developer experience while boosting productivity. The goal is to minimize time spent on application plumbing by providing those Laravel tools upfront so you can concentrate on creating high-value features and domain logic.
For developers familiar with frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Laravel follows similar design patterns and architectures that prioritize rapid prototypes while also scaling to complex applications with stability and security in mind. The knowledge transfer from other PHP frameworks makes Laravel a preferred choice.
Unlike limited content management systems like WordPress, Laravel enables fully custom applications with endless design flexibility matched to use case needs. The extensive routing, middleware, caching, and ORM foundations facilitate rapidly molding apps to specific requirements.
Why choose Ropstam Solutions for your next Laravel project?
Laravel is one of the most widely used PHP frameworks thanks to its handful of useful features. Despite the fact that Laravel is not suitable for e-commerce sites or mobile application development, capabilities like Object-Oriented libraries, robust security mechanisms, and support for MVC architecture make it the go-to choice for streamlining web application development.
Selecting the ideal framework is the first step toward crafting a high-quality web application. At Ropstam Solutions, we have a dedicated team of web developers, boasting years of experience in Laravel development.
With more than a decade of experience in the field of IT, we have delivered countless web development projects to our satisfied clients. If you are looking forward to joining hands with us for your next software development project, contact us now.
