Laravel is an open source PHP based web framework which makes it super easy to develop scalable and efficient web applications in PHP. Here are a few important things to know about Laravel Framework:
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Laravel is created by Taylor Otwell
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Laravel is a free open-source PHP web framework
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Laravel is meant to ease and accelerate the development process of web applications with a great taste for simplicity
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Laravel follows the model-view-controller (MVC) architectural pattern
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Laravel follows the PSR-2 coding standard, and the PSR-4 autoloading standard.
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Laravel Runs an Test Driven Development (TDD).
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Laravel is Hosted on GitHub and available at https://github.com/laravel/laravel
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Laravel is having boasts of a micro-services architecture, making it tremendously extendable with the use of custom-made and or existing third-party packages.
Main Features of Laravel
Following are some of the major features of Laravel framework:
1. MVC: Laravel uses the MVC architecture, therefore there are three core-parts of the framework which work together: models, views and controllers. The controllers are the main part where most of the processing work is done.
They connect to models to get, create or update data and display the results on views, which contain the actual HTML structure of the application.
2. Blade Templating Engine: Laravel is having a templating engine named as Blade. Blade is quite easy to use, yet, powerful.
One important feature of the Blade templating engine that other popular templating engines lack is that it allows the use of plain PHP code in Blade templating engine files.
It is important to note that Blade templating engine files have .blade extension appended to file names right before the usual .php extension which is nothing other than the actual file extension.
So, .blade.php is the final result file extension for Blade template files. Blade template engine files are placed in the resources/views directory.
3. Routing & Middleware: We can define the URLs of our application with the help of routes. These routes can contain variable data, connect to controllers or can be wrapped into middlewares.
Middelware is a mechanism for filtering HTTP requests. They can be used to interact with requests before they reach the controllers and can thus modify or reject requests.
4. Artisan: The Laravel Artisan is the command line tool you can use to control parts of Laravel. There are a lot of commands available to create models, controllers and other resources needed for development. We can also write your own commands to extend the Artisan command line tool.
5. Eloquent ORM: To connect your models to various types of databases, Laravel offers its own ORM with a large set of functions to work with.
The framework also provides migration and seeding and also features rollbacks. Using the Laravel ORM, interacting with the database tables becomes just funciton calls as you do not have to write SQL queries anymore.
6. Event Handling: The Laravel framework is capable of handling events across the application. You can create event listeners and event handlers that are similar to the ones from NodeJs.
Laravel Versions with Version Release Date
Following are the versions of Laravel released till date.
