Laravel Introduction & Features
Laravel
Laravel is
a frere, open-source PHP web
framework, created by Taylor Otwell and intended for the development of web
applications following the model–view–controller (MVC) architectural pattern. Some of the
features of Laravel are a modular packaging
system with a dedicated
dependency manager, different ways for accessing relational databases, utilities that
aid in application deployment and maintenance, and its orientation
toward syntactic sugar.
As of March 2015, Laravel is regarded as one of the
most popular PHP frameworks, together with Symfony2, Nette, CodeIgniter, Yii2 and
other frameworks.
The source
code of Laravel is hosted on GitHub and licensed under the terms of MIT License.
Laravel Philosophy
Laravel is a web application
framework with expressive, elegant syntax. We believe development must be an
enjoyable, creative experience to be truly fulfilling. Laravel attempts to take
the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web
projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.
Laravel aims to make the development
process a pleasing one for the developer without sacrificing application
functionality. Happy developers make the best code. To this end, we've
attempted to combine the very best of what we have seen in other web frameworks,
including frameworks implemented in other languages, such as Ruby on Rails,
ASP.NET MVC, and Sinatra.
Laravel is accessible, yet powerful,
providing powerful tools needed for large, robust applications. A superb
inversion of control container, expressive migration system, and tightly
integrated unit testing support give you the tools you need to build any
application with which you are tasked.
History
Taylor Otwell created Laravel as an attempt to provide
a more advanced alternative to the CodeIgniter framework, which did not provide
certain features such as built-in support for user authentication and authorization.
1.
Laravel's first beta release was made available on June 9, 2011,
followed by the Laravel 1 release later in the same month. Laravel 1
included built-in support for authentication, localisation, models, views, sessions, routing and other
mechanisms, but lacked support for controllers that prevented it from being a true MVC framework.
2.
Laravel 2
was released in September 2011, bringing various improvements from the author
and community. Major new features included the support for controllers, which
made Laravel 2 a fully MVC-compliant framework, built-in support for the inversion of control (IoC) principle, and a templating system called Blade. As a downside, support
for third-party packages was removed in Laravel 2.
3.
Laravel 3
was released in February 2012 with a set of new features including the command-line interface (CLI) named Artisan, built-in support for
more database management systems,
database migrations as a form of version
control for database layouts,
support for handling events, and
a packaging system called Bundles.
An increase of the Laravel's userbase and popularity lined up with the release
of Laravel 3.
4.
Laravel 4,
codenamed Illuminate, was
released in May 2013. It was made as a complete rewrite of the Laravel
framework, migrating its layout into a set of separate packages distributed
through Composer, which serves as
an application-level package
manager. Such a layout improved the extendibility of Laravel 4, which was
paired with its official regular release schedule spanning six months between
minor point releases. Other new
features in the Laravel 4 release include database seeding for the initial population of
databases, support for message
queues, built-in support for sending different types of email, and support for
delayed deletion of database records called soft
deletion.
5.
Laravel 5
was released in February 2015 as a result of internal changes that ended up in
renumbering the then-future Laravel 4.3 release. New features in the
Laravel 5 release include support for scheduling periodically executed
tasks through a package called Scheduler,
an abstraction layer called Flysystem that allows remote storage to be used
in the same way as local file
systems, improved handling of package assets through Elixir, and simplified
externally handled authentication through the optional Socialite package. Laravel 5 also
introduced a new internal directory
tree structure for developed
applications.
6.
Laravel 5.1,
released in June 2015, is the first release of Laravel to receive long-term support (LTS), with planned availability of bug fixes for three years and security patches for three years. LTS releases of
Laravel are planned to be released every two years.
7.
Laravel 5.3,
released in August 23, 2016,The new features in 5.3 are focused on improving
developer speed by adding additional out of the box improvements for common
tasks.
Features
The following features serve as
Laravel's key design points (features of Laravel 3):
·
Bundles provide a modular packaging system since the
release of Laravel 3, with bundled features already available for easy
addition to applications. Furthermore, Laravel 4 uses Composer as a
dependency manager to add framework-agnostic and Laravel-specific PHP packages
available from the Packagist repository.
·
Eloquent
ORM (object-relational mapping) is
an advanced PHP implementation of the active record pattern, providing at
the same time internal methods for enforcing constraints on the relationships
between database objects. Following the active record pattern,
Eloquent ORM presents database tables as classes, with their object
instances tied to single table rows.
·
Query
builder, available since Laravel 4,
provides a more direct database access alternative to the Eloquent ORM. Instead
of requiring SQL queries to be written directly, Laravel's query
builder provides a set of classes and methods capable of building
queries programmatically. It also allows selectable caching of the
results of executed queries.
·
Application
logic is an integral part of
developed applications, implemented either by using controllers or as
part of the route declarations. The syntax used to define application
logic is similar to the one used by Sinatra framework.
·
Reverse
routing defines a relationship between
the links and routes, making it possible for later changes to routes to be
automatically propagated into relevant links. When the links are created by
using names of existing routes, the appropriate uniform resource
identifiers (URIs) are automatically created by Laravel.
·
Restful
controllers provide an optional way for
separating the logic behind serving HTTP GET and POST requests.
·
Class auto
loading provides automated loading of
PHP classes without the need for manual maintenance of inclusion paths.
On-demand loading prevents inclusion of unnecessary components, so only the
actually used components are loaded.
·
View composers serve as customizable logical code units that can be
executed when a view is loaded.
·
Blade templating engine combines one or more templates
with a data model to produce resulting views, doing that by transpiling the
templates into cached PHP code for improved performance. Blade also provides a
set of its own control structures such as conditional statements and loops,
which are internally mapped to their PHP counterparts. Furthermore, Laravel
services may be called from Blade templates, and the templating engine itself
can be extended with custom directives.
·
IoC
containers make it possible for new
objects to be generated by following the inversion of control (IoC)
principle, in which the framework calls into the application- or task-specific
code, with optional instantiating and referencing of new objects as singletons.
·
Migrations provide a version control system for database
schemas, making it possible to associate changes in the application's codebase and
required changes in the database layout. As a result, this feature simplifies
the deployment and updating of Laravel-based applications.
·
Database
seeding provides a way to populate
database tables with selected default data that can be used for application testing or
be performed as part of the initial application setup.
·
Unit
testing is provided as an integral
part of Laravel, which itself contains unit tests that detect and prevent regressions in
the framework. Unit tests can be run through the provided artisan command-line
utility.
·
Automatic
pagination simplifies the task of
implementing pagination, replacing the usual manual implementation approaches
with automated methods integrated into Laravel.
·
Form
request is a feature of Laravel 5
that serves as the base for form input validation by internally
binding event listeners, resulting in automated invoking of the form
validation methods and generation of the actual form.
·
Homestead - a Vagrant virtual machine that
provides Laravel developers with all the tools nessessary to develop Laravel
straight out of the box, including, Ubuntu, Gulp , Bower and
other development tools that are useful in developing full scale web
applications.
In Short Laravel offers the following key features −
- Modularity
- Testability
- Routing
- Configuration management
- Query builder and ORM (Object
Relational Mapper)
- Schema builder, migrations, and
seeding
- Template engine
- E-mailing
- Authentication
- Redis
- Queues
- Event and command bus
Thank you for writing this informative blog. This info on Laravel 6 is helpful in understanding about newly introduced Laravel 7.
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