Laravel 5 is one of the most leading and popular PHP frameworks among the Web Artisans. It is a latest and best web application framework with advanced query syntax that makes web development simple and rapid by enabling general tasks that will be used in the majority of web projects such as route, queue, sessions, caching and authentication.
The success of Laravel can certainly be attributed to its features. A majority of PHP developers are using Laravel, and the number is continually growing, owing to a large section of developers switching over to this framework. Launched in 2011, Laravel has surged ahead of its competitors and tops the 2015 charts as the leading PHP framework.
This framework is an open source web application framework. It follows the Model-View-Controller architectural pattern. Using this pattern, user interfaces can be implemented. The MVC design pattern has a model(responsible for maintaining data), view(responsible for generating a user interface), and controller(a link between model and view, and sends commands to both) as the components. Famously known as "fullstack" framework, Laravel can manage database, web serving, HTML generation, etc. Also, at a time when not many frameworks provided features like, support for user authentication and authorization, Laravel has done it.
Eight top features of Laravel that make it the most popular framework
View composers:
They are class methods or callbacks which are called when a view is rendered. View composer helps in organizing logic into one location.Using view composers, one can bind data to view without the need for code duplication and there is no necessity of manual attachment of data.
Blade template engine:
The Blade is a very simple and powerful template engine with all the tools. Template inheritance and sections drive the blade. ".blade.php" extension. This default and inbuilt template helps in saving more HTML code writing.
Artisan:
In Laravel, Artisan is the name given to command line interface. Artisan offers a wide range of commands in the course of application development. "List" command can be used to view all the artisan commands.
Routing system:
Routing in Laravel is very useful and helps to control HTTP mechanism of the application. Static page handling, passing parameters, group routing and 404 page management can be easily done in Laravel.
Event broadcasting
In Laravel5.1 programmers can find a new tool for broadcasting events out to Pusher.com. Instead of Pusher.com, developers can resort to the Redis based Socket.io too. Pusher.com and Socket make use of web sockets to establish a connection with the user’s web browser directly. It enables programmers to push an event straightly to the user instead of reloading a page many times. The 5.1 version comes out with a Should Broadcast interface and a much refined Broadcast On method for adding the flexibility of broadcasting events.
Passing of parameters to Middleware
One of the main difficulties that occurred while using Laravel 5 was the passing of parameters to the Middleware. The route filters in Laravel 5 were not well set to handle the passing of parameters to Middleware. With the modifications done to the base codes, Laravel 5.1 has been improved to take parameters passed to the Middleware as well.
Renovated Integration Testing
Integration testing is done to find out errors in the functioning of an application as an integrated unit. The new version of Laravel showcases immense emphasize in offering the best classes and methods to do integration testing of applications in the form of Model factories, Database Migrations, and Database transactions. This version even offers programmers to enable testing without Middleware Trait operator as well. Now the classes and methods will seem much shorter, and effective in Laravel 5.1 with superior features.
Long time support & other random updates
5.1 will be the first version of Laravel to offer a long time support. Adding to the core, this new framework has options to exclude routes from CSRF Middleware, run third party scripts without SSH, and some Elixir improvements to help better compiling of ECMA Script6.
Laravel also winner of Best PHP Framework Around the World in SitePoint Survey 2015
Straight from the Woxiprogrammers desk
Sagar Acharya
