[Part 1] WHO ARE YOU, PHP LARAVEL DEVELOPER?

Recently, countless businesses are in high demand for hiring PHP Laravel Developer. So, what is Laravel? What should enterprises know about the framework in advance to effectively develop their projects and hire professional Laravel Development Teams?

What is Laravel?
Laravel is an open-source PHP framework, which is robust and easy to understand. It follows a model-view-controller design pattern. Laravel reuses the existing components of different frameworks which helps in creating a web application. The web application thus designed is more structured and pragmatic.

Source: Digitalustaad

Laravel offers a rich set of functionalities that incorporates the basic features of PHP frameworks like CodeIgniter, Yii, and other programming languages like Ruby on Rails. Laravel has a very rich set of features that will boost the speed of web development.

If you are familiar with Core PHP and Advanced PHP, Laravel will make your task easier. It saves a lot of time if you are planning to develop a website from scratch. Moreover, a website built in Laravel is secure and prevents several web attacks.

Development History – Know to choose your best fit!
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. 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, localization, models, views, sessions, routing, and other mechanisms, but lacked support for controllers that prevented it from being a true MVC framework.

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.

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 in Laravel’s userbase and popularity lined up with the release of Laravel 3.

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 extensibility 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 a soft deletion.

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.

Laravel 5.1, released in June 2015, was the first release of Laravel to receive long-term support (LTS). New LTS versions were planned for one every two years.

Laravel 5.3 was released on 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.

Laravel 5.4 was released on January 24, 2017, with many new features like Laravel Dusk, Laravel Mix, Blade Components and Slots, Markdown Emails, Automatic Facades, Route Improvements, Higher Order Messaging for Collections, and many others.

Laravel 6 was released on September 3, 2019, with shift blueprint code generation, introducing semantic versioning, compatibility with Laravel Vapor, improved authorization responses, improved job middleware, lazy collections, and sub-query improvements. The frontend scaffolding was removed from the main package and moved into the Laravel/UI package.

Laravel 7 was released on March 3, 2020, with new features like Laravel Sanctum, Custom Eloquent Casts, Blade Component Tags, Fluent String Operations, and Route Model Binding Improvements.

The latest Laravel version is version 8, which was released on September 8, 2020, with new features like Laravel Jetstream, model factory classes, migration squashing, Tailwind CSS for pagination views, and other usability improvements.

Release History
Source: Wikipedia

Advantages of Laravel
Laravel offers you the following advantages when you are designing a web application based on this framework:
✓ The web application becomes more scalable, owing to the Laravel framework.
✓ Considerable time is saved in designing the web application since Laravel reuses the components from other frameworks in developing web applications.
✓ The framework includes namespaces and interfaces, thus helps to organize and manage resources.

Composer
Composer is a tool that includes all the dependencies and libraries. It allows a user to create a project with respect to the mentioned framework (for example, those used in Laravel installation). Third-party libraries can be installed easily with help of Composer.
All the dependencies are noted in the composer.json file which is placed in the source folder.

Artisan
The command-line interface used in Laravel is called Artisan. It includes a set of commands which assists in building a web application. These commands are incorporated from the Symphony framework, resulting in add-on features in Laravel 5.1.

Features of Laravel
Laravel offers the following key features which make it an ideal choice for designing web applications

Modularity
Laravel provides 20 built-in libraries and modules which helps in the enhancement of the application. Every module is integrated with the Composer dependency manager which eases updates.

Testability
Laravel includes features and helpers which helps in testing through various test cases. This feature helps in maintaining the code as per the requirements.

Routing
Laravel provides a flexible approach to the user to define routes in the web application. Routing helps to scale the application in a better way and increases its performance.

Configuration Management
A web application designed in Laravel will be running on different environments, which means that there will be a constant change in its configuration. Laravel provides a consistent approach to handle the configuration in an efficient way.

Query Builder and ORM
Laravel incorporates a query builder that helps in querying databases using various simple chain methods. It provides ORM (Object Relational Mapper) and ActiveRecord implementation called Eloquent.

Schema Builder
Schema Builder maintains the database definitions and schema in PHP code. It also maintains a track of changes with respect to database migrations.

Template Engine
Laravel uses the Blade template engine, a lightweight template language used to design hierarchical blocks and layouts with predefined blocks that include dynamic content.

E-mail
Laravel includes a mail class that helps in sending mail with rich content and attachments from the web application.

Authentication
User authentication is a common feature in web applications. Laravel eases designing authentication as it includes features such as register, forgot password, and send password reminders.

Redis
Laravel uses Redis to connect to an existing session and general-purpose cache. Redis interacts with the session directly.

Queues
Laravel includes queue services like emailing a large number of users or a specified Cron job. These queues help in completing tasks in an easier manner without waiting for the previous task to be completed.

Event and Command Bus
Laravel 5.1 includes Command Bus which helps in executing commands and dispatch events in a simple way. The commands in Laravel act as per the application’s lifecycle.

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Tutorialspoint & Wikipedia​