Why Laravel Is A Perfect Match For Web Application Development Services
Introduction:
For PHP developers, choosing their PHP framework is a challenge. One has to get used to the building interface and the tools they provide. CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Zend Framework, Symfony, and Yii, are some of the tested and most popular frameworks in the digital world. But the newer ones at the moment are bringing in far more technologically advanced tools. Laravel for Enterprise App Development is one such PHP framework.
CodeIgniter was a phenomenal framework in its heyday. It f was preferred by a large majority of the PHP developers because of its simplicity, small footprint, and good documentation. For small to medium-sized applications, the Laravel PHP framework is a good fit. Besides, an amateur developer will easily be able to take part in the development process with Laravel.
In this world of rapid digitization, software developers are constantly looking for compelling web application development solutions. With new PHP frameworks that supply the barebone structure of a web application, building a web application for any purpose has become a more convenient task than before. Laravel development firm provides the best tools for building modern, full-stack web applications.
What is Laravel?
A software framework designed to aid developers in building web applications with web services, web resources, and web APIs is a web framework. It provides the developer a standard way to develop and deploy web applications on the internet. The goal of web frameworks is to automate the overhead associated with the usual tasks performed in web development.
Laravel Application Development Company offers a free, open-source PHP web framework with the help of the model-view-controller (MVC) architectural pattern. It is based on Symfony. GitHub hosts the source code of Laravel. It had been licensed under MIT license.
Developer Taylor Otwell released the first version of Laravel in June 2010. It was created to be more advanced than the CodeIgniter framework. Laravel 1 introduced tools like built-in support for authentication, localization, views, sessions, models, routing, etc. But it did not have the support for controllers, so it was not a valid MVC framework yet.
The latest Laravel version 8 was released on September 8, 2020. By now, it has become a true MVC web framework. The company is also planning some future releases in the coming years. Riding on a decade of expertise, Laravel is the talk of the town for its high-end features and extensive documentation.
Why Is Laravel's CLI The Best Choice?
Laravel 3 introduced its command-line interface (CLI), called Artisan, in February 2012. It had a limited function. Later, Laravel development services chose to follow a Composer-based architecture. This allowed Artisan to incorporate different components from the Symfony framework so that the next version of Laravel had more impressive Artisan features.
Laravel-based applications are managed and developed with the help of the Artisan command-line utility. Artisan's features respond to multiple subcommands of this command-line utility.
Artisan can be used to manage database migrations and seeding, publish package assets, and generate boilerplate code for new controllers and migrations. The boilerplate code that Artisan generates does not require the developer to create proper code skeletons. The effectiveness of Artisan can also be expanded by using new custom commands for various purposes.
Exciting Features Provided By Laravel:
Progression and growth:
Laravel claims to be a "progressive" framework that grows with the web developer. Laravel has extensive resources of documentation, guides, and video tutorials that have been created and modified over the years to help their users learn everything they need to use Laravel.
Robust tools for dependency injection, unit testing, queues, and real-time events are among the more trendy options Laravel provides for experienced IT professionals. It can easily handle considerable workloads in more prominent brands and build professional web applications.
Scalability:
PHP facilitates scaling, and Laravel uses this advantage to provide built-in support for fast, distributed cache systems like Redis, horizontal scaling. According to company statistics, apps made with Laravel have been scaled to handle hundreds of millions of requests per month.
A platform like Laravel Vapor will allow the developers to explore extreme scaling. It will run its Laravel application at a nearly infinite scale on AWS's latest serverless technology.
Community:
Laravel is the most user-friendly framework where the developer can combine the best packages in the PHP ecosystem and build their application. The Laravel application development company has an enriching community engaged in developing and updating Laravel. They make sure that the developers using Laravel face no problem.
Laravel Sail:
The software tool Docker runs applications in small, lightweight "containers." These containers do not interfere with the software or configuration that has already been installed on the computer. Configuring or setting up essential tools like web servers and databases on the developer's personal computer does not tamper with tools that are already existing. Since it requires only the installation of Docker Desktop, the whole process becomes more convenient.
For the developer's benefit, Laravel has launched its Sail interface. It is a lightweight command-line interface that helps to engage with the default Docker configuration that exists in Laravel. With Sail, one can build Laravel applications using PHP, MySQL, and Redis without prior Docker experience.
Creating Laravel applications on various OS:
With Laravel development services, the developer can build applications on various OS.
- For Mac - If Docker Desktop is already installed, a simple terminal command can create a new Laravel project.
- For Windows - After installing Docker Desktop and Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2), one will be able to run Linux binary executables natively on Windows 10. This will create a new Laravel project.
- For Linux - With Docker, the developer can use a simple terminal command to create a new Laravel project.
- If a computer has PHP and Composer installed already, one can easily create a new Laravel project by using Composer directly.
Convenient Configuration:
Laravel comes with a ready-to-use configuration. Although it requires almost no configuration, the user might want to personalize and customize specific settings like timezone and locale. This can be done by reviewing the config/app.php file. Other than that, all configuration files for the Laravel framework are stored in the config directory and are out-of-the-box.
Simple Interaction With Databases:
Laravel supports databases using raw SQL, a fluent query builder, and the Eloquent ORM. This makes the developers' interaction with the databases extremely simple. Laravel has a first-party support tie-in with four databases:
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
- SQLite
- SQL Server
Query Builder Facilitates Innovation:
A fluent interface is beneficial for web applications developers to create and run database queries. The query builder that comes with Laravel recognizes this. It has excellent functionality and adaptability as it can be used to perform most database operations in the web application and adapts well with all of Laravel's supported database systems.
Laravel's query builder uses PDO parameter binding. This protects the web application against SQL injection attacks. The strings are passed to the query builder as query bindings, so there is no need to clean and sanitize them.
Full-stack Framework:
Laravel can efficiently function as a full-stack framework, where the web developer can use Laravel to route requests to the application created. It can also render the frontend via Blade templates or using a single-page application hybrid technology like Inertia.js. Most web developers use the Laravel framework this way.
To use Laravel as a full-stack framework to its full potential, the user must also learn to compile their application's CSS and JavaScript using Laravel Mix.
API Backend:
Laravel can also perform as an API backend to a JavaScript single-page application or mobile application. The user can conveniently use Laravel as an API backend for their Next.js application. Laravel can help to provide authentication and data storage/retrieval for the application. Laravel's services like queues, emails, notifications, etc., are also beneficial.
Blade Templating Engine:
Laravel comes with the high-performing templating engine, Blade. It is simple and easy to use, better than more complicated PHP templating engines. Blade poses no restriction on the user for using plain PHP code in their templates. It adds no overhead to the application as all Blade templates are compiled into basic PHP code and cached until modified.
Seamless Exception Handling:
Error and exception handling is already configured for the application when Laravel is used to build it. All exceptions generated by the application are logged and stored in the App\Exceptions\Handler class. They are then rendered to the user by Laravel.
Documentation And Support:
Laravel for enterprise app development has extensive documentation produced over a decade of development and updates. This helps the user to adapt to the software quickly. Laravel's development community provides help in the form of more interactive services like:
- Blog
- Laracasts
- Laravel News
- Laracon
- Jobs
- Laracon EU
- Forums
- Laracon AU
- Certification
Out-of-the-box First-party Packages Provided By Laravel:
The Laravel Ecosystem is a vast resource of all the tools a developer may need. Some of the first-party packages that can be used out-of-the-box in Laravel are:
Vapor:
For a server-less platform, Vapor is the ideal tool to use. The developer can scale their application easily with Laravel Vapor.
Forge:
With the seamless server management of Forge, the user can deploy unlimited PHP applications on various platforms.
Envoyer:
It provides a clean, minimal syntax for setting up everyday tasks like deployment to run on the developer's remote servers.
Horizon:
For an attractive dashboard and code-driven configuration for the Laravel powered Redis queues, Horizon is used.
Nova:
The visually appealing administration panel offered by Nova helps keep tasks organized. It gives the application a clean look.
Cashier:
Cashier manages subscription Billing services by Laravel development firm. It handles all boilerplate subscription billing codes, coupons, swapping subscriptions, subscription quantities, cancellation grace periods, and generation of invoice PDFs.
Dusk:
Unlike other PHP frameworks, Laravel Dusk does not require users to install JDK or Selenium on their local computer. It is easy-to-use browser automation and testing API.
Sanctum:
Sanctum was introduced in Laravel 7.0. It allows a featherweight authentication system for simple, token-based APIs, SPAs (single page applications), and mobile applications. It was initially known as Laravel Airlock but was renamed later.
Scout:
Scout is a driver-based and straightforward tool. It can be used for adding full-text search to the developer's Eloquent models. It helps in keeping the user's search indexes in sync with their Eloquent records.
Socialite:
Socialite provides a simplified way for authentication with multiple OAuth providers. It supports Facebook, Twitter, Google, GitHub, GitLab, LinkedIn, and Bitbucket.
Telescope:
Introduced in Laravel 5.7, Telescope is a debug assistant. It checks, reviews, and sends the user all the requests that come into their application, exceptions, log entries, database queries, queued jobs, mail, notifications, cache operations, scheduled tasks, variable dumps, etc. The Composer package manager can be used to install Telescope.
Breeze:
All of Laravel's authentication features, including login, registration, password reset, email verification, and password confirmation, are managed by the simple implementation provided by Breeze. It is the ideal starting kit for Laravel for Enterprise App Development. Simple Breeze templates are styled with the help of Tailwind CSS. This makes up Laravel Breeze's default view layer.
Jetstream:
This feature comes with Laravel 8.0, the latest version of the framework. Jetstream supports application scaffolding for Laravel. The application starter kit provides an implementation for the application's login, registration, email verification, two-factor authentication, API via Sanctum, session management, and optional team management features.
Jetstream improves and effectively builds on the UI tools already present in earlier versions of Laravel applications. This allows the user to choose from two options, Livewire + Blade or Inertia.js + Vue.
This package works with Laravel Fortify, which is an older application scaffolding for the framework.
Fortify:
Laravel Fortify was also introduced in Laravel 8.0 as an application scaffold for Laravel. The management of typical user tasks is the most common task of Fortify. It also helps to build upon typical authentication to provide teams and two-factor authentication mechanisms. Fortify was created keeping in mind certain older features of Laravel Spark. But now, Fortify works closely with Laravel Jetstream.
Conclusion:
Laravel development firm offers top-class features for web application developers at no cost. The demand for developers using Laravel to build web applications has opened up more job opportunities in the IT sector.