Introduction

PHP is one of the most popular and oldest open-source back-end scripting languages. Web developers highly prefer PHP due to its cross-platform development, ease of development, and reliability. Well known websites such as Facebook, Wikipedia & WordPress use PHP in their back-end development.

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Many PHP frameworks with wide-ranging technical abilities are in the market, such as Laravel, Symfony, CodeIgniter, Yii 2, Phalcon, CakePHP, etc. However, Laravel stands above all of them in popularity and functionality. The love for the Laravel PHP Framework by developers is proved by the more than 70,000 stars, making it one of the top GitHub repositories. Laravel’s extreme popularity makes Laravel Developers one of the most in-demand coders.

The Laravel framework: what is it?

‍Laravel is a free and open-source PHP development framework. Taylor Otwell developed it in 2011 as an improved alternative to the then popular CodeIgniter framework. The specialty of Laravel is that it enables developers to build robust web apps easier and faster through its built-in features. Laravel aims to simplify the complex web development process and makes it less time-consuming. Laravel released its first stable version in 2011. However, it rose to fame only after version 3 came out in 2012. Currently, Laravel is running its 9.2.1 version, which transitioned to stable in April 2022.

Why do developers love Laravel?

Laravel is miles above any other PHP framework in the industry. Laravel incorporates simplicity, speed, and reliability in the development process through features such as in-built directories and years of development and upgrades. Developers prefer Laravel as it aims to make web development a fun task while providing all the needed functionalities. It also makes development less painful by making routine and repetitive tasks commonly used in web projects like sessions, caching, routing, and authentication easier. Laravel is a very developer-focused framework. It was designed to make a developer’s work easy and fun while minimizing the barriers to bringing an idea to reality. In an answer, Taylor Otwell mentioned how he would spend a ridiculous amount of time agonizing over making the code look pretty, simply to improve the experience of looking at the code itself. Laravel has made its developer-oriented targeting clear in all of its materials. Especially where they mention, “Happy developers make the best code.” Having known the core idea of Laravel, let us go through what exactly makes Laravel so desirable for a web development company & developers alike.

What makes Laravel such a great framework?

1. Model View Controller Support and Object-Oriented Approach

‍One thing that sets Laravel apart from the rest is that it does something that others don’t. It provides hassle-free MVC support. Moreover, the object-oriented approach taken by Laravel allows developers to build responsive, modular, and easy-to-use web applications swiftly.

2. The superior Eloquent ORM

Eloquent ORM is Laravel’s pre-installed Object Relational Mapper implementation. The Eloquent ORM is far exceptional in comparison to the ORMs of other PHP frameworks. This Expressive vocabulary for dealing with database objects and connections is made possible by this object-relational mapping.

3. The Artisan CLI simplifies tasks

The Artisan Command Line interface or Artisan CLI is a genuinely remarkable inclusion in the framework. It helps developers with several useful commands and allows them to build commands that make some of the most complicated tasks simple, which can be carried out in just moments. Additionally, the CLI assists developers in creating database structures and flawlessly migrating them.

4. Create extraordinary layouts

The Laravel framework comes pre-installed with the lightweight Blade Templating Engine. It enables developers to create exceptional layouts by using dynamic content seeding. Furthermore, it is easily compatible with PHP & HTML. With the Blade template engine, extending layouts and displaying data can be implemented without compromising the application’s performance or speed.

5. Events & Broadcasting

The event broadcasting feature helps you retrieve real-time data by broadcasting server-side Laravel events to the client-side of the application. This is done using a driver-based approach to WebSockets.

6. Task Scheduling made easy

Laravel, through its command scheduler, offers a fresh and simple way to manage and schedule tasks on servers. The scheduler is an extension to the Artisan command-line utility that allows programmable scheduling of frequently executed tasks. It allows programmers to eloquently define the command schedule within the Laravel application itself through a single cron entry in the server.

7. Integrated Authorization & Authentication

Laravel comes with a built-in authentication and authorization system. This ensures that the developed application will be 100% secure through authentication and authorization with just a few artisan instructions.

8. A seamless testing process

Laravel ensures the quality and performance of your app through unit testing. It further eliminates the need to run separate tests to assess your app’s performance or functioning. It also provides faster testing through automation. Automation ensures that no gaps are left while testing the core features. It ensures the perfect functioning of apps by calculating an accurate performance ratio by handling multiple scenarios.

Official Free Packages

- Cashier:

Despite being incorporated into Laravel 4.2, Cashier remains one of its most valuable packages. Its features are interfaces for managing Stripe’s subscription billing services, such as generating invoices and processing coupons.

- Socialite:

It facilitates OAuth authentication in a streamlined manner. This enables users to log in to some of the most popular social platforms such as Google, Facebook, GitHub, Twitter, BitTorrent, etc. This permits applications to deploy these socialite logins swiftly.

- Horizon:

Using Horizon, you can track key metrics in the queue system, such as the success or failure of a job. It gives Laravel-powered Redis queues an elegant dashboard and a code-driven configuration.

- Passport:

The Passport is a simple-to-use OAuth2 server and API authentication package. Laravel passport provides a full OAuth server implementation for online applications in minutes.

- Scout:

It is a built-in driver-based solution for adding full-text search to eloquent models. Angola is the default full-text search driver and provides an excellent service. However, you can choose another driver as a custom driver, which is simple and can expand the search capabilities.

The list of packages goes on and on.

How Does Laravel Framework Help Businesses?

Easy access to pre-built components & a strong developer community

Laravel is the complete PHP package! Laravel comprises various value-adding in-built features and functionalities, such as the MVC architecture, the Artisan command-line tool, object-oriented libraries, etc. Also, it facilitates third-party integration with rapid API, iron.in, testing, etc. This provides programmers with a large variety of functionalities while reducing the time and cost of web development. Laravel’s strong developer community constantly works towards optimizing it, fixing issues, and rolling out modules and plugins. Moreover, Laravel is a highly secure platform, and it continually works towards maintaining it by constantly rolling out new security packages. All this has contributed significantly to the framework’s popularity, and companies all over are looking to hire Laravel developers.

But above all, for any old or new web application development framework, it is the developer community that determines its popularity. And as we have already seen, Laravel was developed keeping in mind the needs and happiness of developers, and hence it was warmly welcomed and fully embraced. Thus, it was inevitable that Laravel climbed to its heights of popularity.