Laravel is one of the most used with the largest community in the world of the internet. It is quite modern, offering many powerful utilities to developers, allowing them to speed up the development of web apps.

Laravel places great emphasis on code quality, ease of scalability, and maintainability, allowing for small, large, and very large projects.

Also, it facilitates and allows teamwork by promoting best practices.

What is Laravel, and what is it for?

It is important to know what it is and what it is for. It is one of the best-known open source PHP frameworks in the world of programming.

It has achieved this due to its simplicity in the syntax of its code and ease of developing projects efficiently and quickly. Its tools, apart, make it one of the best options for the development of web applications.

It is mainly used in backend development or programming, but it is also one of the main PHP frameworks for full-stack applications.

This means that every time functions are developed so that users can log in on a page or any other layer of data that is not directly visible to users is programmed, it is likely that the web programmer has used the kind features. From Laravel.

Its popularity lies in the fact that this framework seeks to develop PHP code in a more presentable and simple way.

On the web portal, there is a large library of files that facilitate the work of developers, having permanent maintenance and expansion.

This large library of files allows a web programmer to access Laravel packages that prevent them from having to write the code of the apps that are usually common on web pages.

A developer using Laravel can download a package to add user authentication functions, database access, and data validation, among other things, to a page.

How does Laravel work for programming?

With the topic of Laravel, it is common for us to ask ourselves: How does Laravel work, and does it mention some features?

Its main purpose is to develop PHP code, but not in any way but in a simple and elegant way. Thus, you avoid using Spaghetti code, those complex and incomprehensible flow control structures.

But what can be developed with Laravel? Next, we will see some web apps that are developed with this PHP framework.

Blade

It is one of the most important tools in Laravel because it represents a templating system.

With this option, you have access to the templates that have already been created, as well as sections in other views in which accessible variables are obtained and with the alternative of using PHP code in them.

Middleware

These represent a series of handlers that are executed before and after a command to the server.

Its purpose is to add multiple processes, controls, and validations at the points mentioned in the development of the application.

Routing

Laravel provides a route management system to keep the multiple routes in the system under control.

Thanks to it, the web routes or API routes that will be visited by end users are configured in a simpler way.

Documentation and Community

There are 2 points that must be reinforced when talking about Laravel, and they are its community and its extensive documentation.

Laravel has a large group of professionals who are willing to put all their skills and experiences at the service of this tool, whether testing new functions or detecting a bug. The support of a united community is a great plus of this tool.

Also, it has great documentation, very complete and quality to satisfy the needs of developers.

Laravel Key Features

The most notable Laravel features for developers are:

• Its architecture is MVC (Model View Controller), which allows the parts of an application to be related to each other. It is one of the most common architectures of frameworks.
• You integrate Laravel with third-party platforms or libraries.
• It has a framework with a very easy connection, so you can have a fairly accelerated learning curve.
• With the ability to run tasks in the background, its intention is to improve performance.
• You have at hand the use of extensions to expand the main functionality of Laravel.

These features are just some reasons why you should choose Laravel to program web applications, but they are not the only ones.

The following points are part of the differences that Laravel has compared to its competitors:

• It uses object-relational mapping, which allows you to access and manipulate databases faster and easier than with other frameworks.
• It includes a list of pre-designed commands that will help you write the lines of code.
• You add functions to improve the web application without having to write them from scratch because it allows you to create your own code packages or install Laravel packages through Composer.
• It has an automatic validation and testing system, which verifies that everything in the programming code works correctly.

Laravel Versions

The first version of Laravel was released in 2011. Over the course of a few months, versions 2 and 3 also arrived to fix some bugs that had arisen and include another list of extra features.

However, the most significant changes came with the development of Laravel 4. This version included component collection functions.

It has been a long road that Laravel has taken to reach its most recent version. The best-known are:

• Laravel 5.3.
• Laravel 5.4.
• Laravel 5.5.
• Laravel 5.6.
• Laravel 6.
• Laravel 7.
• Laravel 8.
• Laravel 9.
• Laravel 10.2.6: This latest version is stable since it improves the route and namespace system, the template system, the home landing page, and the layout.

Recently, on 15 August, it was announced that the Laravel 2023 version will be released very soon. This is Laravel v10. Its release date will be the first quarter of 2023.

In addition, the Laravel framework developer team is already working on the versions that will be released in the following years.

Advantages and disadvantages of using Laravel

Finally, we’ll discuss the advantages and disadvantages that Laravel has when using it.

What are the advantages of using Laravel? One of them is that it is very easy to use and learn as a PHP framework. To that, we add that within the market, it is widely used, and they pay well when you have experience.

Another advantage is its documentation because we are used to encountering extensive documentation. Laravel has many usage examples, along with the packages you need to use in controllers to use those classes.

Its biggest disadvantage is that some libraries and others depend on Symfony, which is another framework of the same style.

But, its learning curve is not so light. The only thing you have to do is look at the documentation to know how each one calls its particular forms and, between the two, know how to use Twig or Blade.

These are different but similar templating engines that use one framework or another.

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