What is Laravel?
Laravel is an open source framework for software development services with PHP 5, PHP 7 and PHP 8. In short, Laravel is a set of generic tools and utilities written in PHP that are very well organized, packaged and open source. What is a PHP framework .
As a good PHP framework, Laravel helps us avoid having to write code that you have already had to write in other projects, or many people before you, such as database connection and management (Eloquent ORM), registration system and authentication. users, etc…
Laravel incorporates Blade , a simple and powerful template engine that will prevent you from having to search for or implement your own configuration system, log system, email system, among other pearls. Yes, Laravel provides you with the basis for all those daily tasks that every project needs, so that you can spend your time finding the solution to your client's problem and not on generic, simple and tedious programming tasks that will only waste your time. .
Why use Laravel in your next web software development project?
When you consider a new project or development of an application, you have surely thought about all the tasks that it entails and the deadlines. Having a ready-made and solid foundation will allow you to shorten deadlines and dedicate your time to what is really important in your project.
In short, frameworks make your life easier . They save you time and put at your disposal a large number of libraries and already programmed functionalities that will prevent you from having to develop them yourself.
Focusing more on Laravel, if you know how to program in PHP, or have used Symfony , you will practically not need to even read the documentation, well, yes you will need it, but it is very very simple.
Haven't I convinced you yet? Below I present the main advantages that I consider most relevant of Laravel so that you are forced to give it a chance in your next web project.
1.PHP
Laravel is written in PHP, sorry haters.
- Active community
Laravel is an open source PHP framework with a hyper-active community, which means that you have countless forums and sites with developers who have probably answered your question a long time ago. On the other hand, it allows the framework to be bug-free and always being updated. A large part of the components that make up the framework come from Symfony, come on, from the good stuff, the best has been selected.
3. Framework managed by Composer
Installing Laravel is very simple, you only need Composer , a command: "composer create-project laravel/laravel myprojectname". Why is it that easy? As I told you before, it is a set of PHP utilities (libraries/packages), therefore, it is installable/updatable from Composer.
4. Eloquent
Eloquent is Laravel's ORM (and it's better than Doctrine). ORMs (Object Relational Mapping) convert data between the database system used in an object-oriented programming language and the use of a relational database as a persistence engine. In practice this creates a virtual object-oriented database, on top of the relational database.
This makes it possible to use the characteristics of object orientation (basically inheritance and polymorphism). Quickly, it allows us to consult and act on the database without having to write PHP, Eloquent is a simple and powerful ORM, it has it all, and better yet, it has it all in a simple and elegant way.
5.Artisan
Artisan exists in the root of the application as a script called "artisan" and provides a series of useful commands to help you while building your application. You can also create your own artisan commands, allowing you to run scheduled/automatic single-line tasks, it's ultra powerful, I love it.
6. Migrations
In the Stone Age, when you worked in a team you had to export/import the database with your colleagues. Migrations provide a solution to this problem, the database tables, their fields, their keys... They are generated/updated from PHP code in the form of classes that are executed by the "artisan migrate" command.
7. Route System, also RESTful
As a good framework, Laravel has its own route system, typically, you can create groups of routes, routes with multiple parameters, pass them functions as arguments, etc...
8. CSRF Token
You can include a security token in all forms that allows them to be sent exclusively from the project. These tokens change every 'n' seconds, for greater security of the project, which allows it to not be autofilled by external software.
9.Blade
The Laravel templating engine. For my taste, the best, prettiest, and most complete template engine for PHP (sorry Twig and Smarty). {{$es_la_caña}}
10. Auth
Login is one less thing to worry about with Laravel. As I indicated at the beginning, with an Artisan command we have set up the base of our authentication system (including the views, model, controllers and database). We can leave it like this, by default it is simple, but functional, or we can modify it to our liking, without problem.
11. Email sending
We can send emails from our events, controllers, or our own commands from a Blade template, yes. It also allows us to send mail not only from the typical Postfix mail server. We have the following drivers by default: "smtp", "mail", "sendmail", "mailgun", "mandrill", "ses", "sparkpost" and "log".
12. Native support for cache, REDIS Hello?
Without any complications, you have a cache on networks (or various other systems) that makes the application run just as fast in production as it does locally.
Some inconvenience?
There has to be something bad about it, right? Well yes, nothing is perfect, although Laravel is close to it.
The main drawback that Laravel has is that it makes things so easy that as custom software development company we can get lost in the details and turn something simple into something too complex . This is a generic problem that we have all fallen into at some point, it has nothing to do with Laravel, but something had to be said.
In summary…
If you still don't know Laravel, now is the time to consider it as a partner in your next project. This PHP framework, perfect for custom software development services and applications from scratch, will make the work dynamic more fluid, allow you to reduce deadlines and start from a solid and elegant foundation.
Do you need to have Laravel experts for your next project? We are your team! We will try to guide you, advise you and carry out your project, contact us!
