Do you know PHP? One of the most popular web programming languages. So popular that more than 58% of users have chosen it as their specialized language!

Now, in order to make the use of PHP language easier and for programmers to go through an easier process for writing programs, a series of frameworks have been designed for PHP. The most popular of these frameworks is Laravel, which is our discussion today!

In this article, we are going to learn about Laravel and its advantages and disadvantages. But before anything else, let’s understand the concept of Framework, which is the prerequisite of this discussion.

What is a framework?

Framework in programming refers to a set of libraries, rules, commands, patterns, etc., which are provided to developers and programmers as a software.

With the help of frameworks, the life of programmers has become much easier than before. They can fix bugs more easily than before, adapt better to advanced technologies, use predefined code, sections and functions, test code easily and save a lot of time!

Among the frameworks made for Laravel, we can mention Yii, Symfony, CodeIgniter, CakePHP and Laravel.

What is Laravel?

So far we have understood that Laravel is a framework for PHP. Now we have to add that the Laravel framework is based on the Model View Controller or MVC architecture and is open source and free.

Now let’s see why the Laravel framework has become so popular.

What are the features of Laravel?

There are 6 features in Laravel that make it head and shoulders above other PHP frameworks. Would you like to know these features?

1) ORM routing system

ORM stands for Eloquent Object Relational.

With the help of this feature, developers can send their requests to the database using PHP syntax instead of writing SQL codes.

2) Template Engine

One of the notable features of Laravel is its built-in style templates. These templates can be used to create new layers and templates for web pages.

3) Blade engine

With the help of Blade rendering engine, you can use HTML, CSS and PHP codes together and see the result in View.

4) Artisan command line

Laravel provides you with a built-in command line tool called Artisan that helps you automate many repetitive and boring programming tasks! Artisan can create a virtual server for your work, create Migration, Controller, Model, etc.

This feature of Artisan multiplies your coding speed.

5) Existence of object oriented libraries

By default, Laravel has object-oriented libraries that are not available in other PHP frameworks. For example, one of these libraries is Authentication, which you can easily enable to do things like checking online users, Bcrypt hashing, password recovery, CSRF protection, etc.

6) Database migration system

Laravel’s Migration system has made it very easy to develop the database structure of the web application. Why? Because you no longer need to make any changes, such as having to change the database structure, with the risk of data loss!

These were just a few of the good features of Laravel. Definitely, when you work with Laravel, you will notice its unique and very useful features.

To wrap things up, let’s take a look at the benefits of Laravel.

What are the advantages of the Laravel framework?

The advantages of Laravel are many; But for now, we mention 5 of its most important and basic advantages and leave the more technical review for the next articles!

1) Simplicity and speed

Laravel is a component-based framework. This means that developers can add the components they need to it. It is interesting to know that because of the Auto Loading feature, any component you add to Laravel will be automatically loaded and compatible with the program.

These features increase the speed of work and lead to saving time, money and energy.

2) High security

Laravel is completely up-to-date in terms of security and you can configure advanced security layers on different sites with the help of it, so that they are safe from cyber attacks.

If we want to have a more technical view, Laravel uses the Bcrypt hashing algorithm. With this algorithm, no password is ever stored in the database.

Apart from these, Laravel has a more powerful authentication system and access level determination compared to other PHP frameworks.

3) High flexibility

With Larval, you can easily design any type of site, from a simple corporate site to a large store. Because of the libraries that already exist in Laravel, it has become very easy for designers to add different sections and functions to the site.

In addition, designers and developers can use Laravel packages. In this way, you enter a line of code in Laravel and its related package (for example, the social network package) is downloaded and all the features you need are available to you.

The Laravel framework has packages that developers can use

4) Has a large community of users

As you can see in the statistics, there are already a lot of developers using Laravel; So we have a large community of users who produce educational content, share their experiences, and in a word, make your access to current information easier and guide you in solving your problems.

5) Clean and small codes

When you code with Laravel, you can save frequently used queries in models and use them later whenever you want.

It’s pretty obvious how much lighter this makes your code.

6) More convenient interaction with the database

Laravel is the only PHP framework that makes building and customizing models easy by using Eloquent ORM. Using Laravel, you can easily manage, call, delete and add objects inside the database.

This performance is a miracle compared to when you have to write complex SQL code to communicate with the database!

What are the prerequisites for installing Laravel?

If you want to install Laravel framework on localhost, you need to have the following programs on your system:

• Apache web server or nGinx Laravel logo
• PHP 7.3 and later

Some PHP extensions:

• BCMath PHP Extension
• Ctype PHP Extension
• Fileinfo PHP
• JSON PHP Extension
• Mbstring PHP Extension
• OpenSSL PHP Extension
• PDO PHP Extension
• Tokenizer PHP Extension
• XML PHP Extension
• MySQL database
• Composer
• environment for programming; Like Atom or VS Code

What is a suitable host for Laravel?

If you want to use Laravel as a framework and are looking for the right Laravel host for it, you can use Softhost’s various hosts.

Linux hosts (such as Linux hosts, WordPress hosts, and cloud hosts) fully support Laravel.

The last word

The simplicity, security and good features of the Laravel framework have made it a pleasure for developers to work with it. If you use another framework instead of Laravel, we’d love to hear your thoughts!

We hope this article has given you a good insight into Laravel and why you should use it. If you have any questions, be sure to post them in the comments section so that we can answer you as soon as possible.