17 Benefits Of Using Laravel for Your Web Application
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Laravel is one of the best PHP frameworks for developing commercial web applications.
This is evidenced by an analysis of the growing interest of PHP developers in Laravel compared to such frameworks like Symfony, Codeigniter, Yii, Zend, etc.
PHP framework is a platform that allows developers to create high-quality server applications and save development time. That is why companies engaged in web development, sooner or later come to the need to choose such a platform for their projects, primarily to compete in speed.
We list the main players in this arena:
- Laravel
- Symfony
- CodeIgniter;
- CakePHP;
- Zend;
- Yii.
But among all this diversity, for some reason, Laravel recognized as the best.
What is Laravel?
Wikipedia tells us that this is an open-source (i.e. absolutely free) framework, created by Taylor Otvel, following MVC architecture and is based on Symfony.
Due to the fact that the Frenchman Fabien (father of Symfony) in the second version performed a huge change to his framework. He changed it in such a way that the components of this “lego” became so independent of each other so that you can safely disassemble it into pieces and assemble anything from them. From such pieces that Laravel was created, the bulk of which was borrowed from Symfony.
So what are the benefits of the Laravel PHP framework?
Benefits of Laravel PHP framework
1. High security
The main security problems are 2 vulnerabilities: SQL injection and cross-site scripting.
The first threat is the transfer of a destructive SQL string through HTTP request parameters. If the system does not check all the parameters coming from the user, then this request can be executed. Laravel doesn’t allow such attacks since uses ORM which, by default, excludes the possibility of raw SQL queries, and all parameters are normalized when building the SQL query. Everything that can harm the data is deleted from it.
The second threat is the introduction of malicious JavaScript code to an arbitrary page on the site. If this happens, the attacker can easily get all the data from the user’s cookies and therefore fake it. Thus, he gets all the privileges of the poor man on whose page this javascript was executed, which he may not even suspect. A similar vulnerability is solved by escaping forbidden HTML tags (in particular, a script tag) and outputting the escaped string as plain text without the possibility of its execution.
2. Increased productivity. Caching.
Another good reason to choose Laravel is a great web application performance. This is achieved through many tools that increase the speed of generating web pages.
Basically, these are caching tools. File system level caching is enabled by default, but you can change this behavior and use more powerful tools like non-SQL databases such as REDIS, Memcache, or APC. These databases are famous for storing data in the form of key-value pairs and do this in the server’s RAM. Due to this, the data access time is sharply reduced and enables developers to cache entire pages, or parts of them, as well as arrays of objects — the results of database queries, thereby reducing their number and speeding page loading. In this art, the main thing for the developer is to correctly invalidate the cache and delete obsolete data in time when they change.
3. Authentication
Laravel provides a pretty advanced user authentication system both through forms and through social networks using OAuth mechanisms.
4. Open source and large community
An important factor in favor of Laravel is his community. This allows you to create a product that is easy to support and look for developers for your project from a large number of adherents of the framework. Open source allows anyone to take part in upgrading and improving both the framework itself and its third-party applications.
5. Blade templates
A key feature of Laravel is the use of Blade templates. With it, you can standardize and reuse the same template in different parts of the application. However, the templating engine does not restrict the developer from using native PHP-methods of templating. You can write spaghetti code, although this is not encouraged by the community.
The Blade templates engine is quite lightweight and does not degrade the performance of generating web pages.
6. Database migration
This technology helps the programmer easily and conveniently change the structure of the database with the ability to roll back the changes in case of an error.
This is especially useful in group development when all participants in the process can apply migration and update the local database with a new structure. Also, migrations allow filling the database with test data.
All of this greatly speeds up the team development process. For example, it eliminates trouble when someone from the team made changes to the database and broke all the applications of colleagues because their database does not contain what the code works with.
7. MVC architecture
Thanks to following the MVC architecture, a clear separation is achieved between 3 abstract layers of the application:
- a model;
- controllers
- view.
They become independent from each other and can be used one without the other.
Everyone knows that a weak connection between system components ensures the stability of the code and dramatically reduces the likelihood of regressions. All of us were faced with a nuisance when corrections of certain bugs in logic break old practices and lead to even more errors in many places.
This situation appears as a result of a strong connection of components during development. It is difficult for any person to take into account all the connections and to predict in what places and what his new code can adversely affect. Therefore, the only right decision would be to cut these ties as much as possible.
8. Object-Oriented libraries
Laravel comes with a lot of pre-installed libraries. One of which is an authentication system. All libraries are very lightweight and user-friendly for developers. Object orientation allows you to reuse code and avoid duplication.
9. Unit tests
When developing web applications of medium and high complexity, the testing problem is especially acute since manual testing takes longer, the more complex the project. Each new feature potentially threatens with bugs, and in the most unexpected places.
In order not to attract additional people and funds, it is necessary to automate the testing process. Unit or unit tests allow you to test software components from within the system, as if by the programmer. In these tests, you connect the component under test, a function, a class and pass in the input data with which it should work, and then get and analyze the output for adequacy.
Laravel has built-in PHPUnit tests out of the box. For each application, settings are created in the phpunit.xml file. In addition to unit tests, there are also functional tests where the system is checked by the user, emulating all his actions, such as filling out and submitting forms, clicking on links, etc. These tests are conducted with the participation of the browser.
10. Promising applications
Due to the wide community, we have a very extensive library of applications written for Laravel and these applications are constantly developed and supported by the authors, regardless of who uses them. Therefore, if you have used any third-party application, it still gives you a certain amount of confidence that it will be updated and developed independently of you and correspond to the most current trends and technologies.
11. Friendly code
When developing libraries for distribution and reuse, all developers strive to write code in such a way that it not only works as it should but is understandable to other programmers. Therefore, working with the framework brings not only material but also moral dividends.
12. Multilingualism
Choosing Laravel offers tremendous benefits for projects targeting different language audiences. Your project can be translated into many languages very simply and quickly.
13. Integration with the mail service
The mail service can be used to send automated emails to users. It’s difficult to imagine a site that does not send notifications of registration of new users by email.
Laravel provides a clear and simple API on top of the popular SwiftMailer library. Does it also have drivers for SMTP? Mailgun, Mandrill, SparkPost, Amazon SES, PHP “mail” and “sendmail” functions allow the application to send mail locally or through cloud services. In addition, Laravel provides support for sending notifications through many other delivery channels, including SMS and Slack.
14. Errors and exceptions
Ways to deal with errors and exceptions can have a big impact on the usability of the application. The most commonplace for errors to occur is user forms. The system must determine the location of the error and notify the user in time. When creating a new application, Laravel already has configured error and exception handlers and, in addition, the Monolog integrated logging library, in which there are many handlers.
15. The system of deferred tasks
Laravel has a queuing system for long-running processes. Also a convenient API for many different backends for managing these queues. This allows you to postpone the execution of processes that take a long time to not slow down the delivery of pages to the user.
16. Run scheduled tasks
Previously, developers were forced to create a Cron instance for each task on the server. This was a headache because each time it was necessary to enter the server through an ssh connection and run a number of commands. Laravel Command Scheduler allows you to conveniently and flexibly manage the schedule for running periodic commands having only one Cron instance per server.
17. Development speed
Today, every business is looking for the most rapid implementation of new technologies in order to stay afloat and successfully compete in the IT market. Using Laravel helps significantly speed up the production process and realize your ideas as soon as possible.
Conclusions
If you are going to choose Laravel for your project, or hire programmers who use it, you can be completely sure that your web application will be competitive and will meet all expectations. In case you are looking for a Laravel developer — we are experts in this technology and can help you build your product.
I was working with Laravel more couple of years already and what I can tell know, that this is truly one of the best tool for web development we have now.
Based on codersrank.io, Laravel now is the most popular framework. He even more popular then JS and Python frameworks. Please see this video to know more:
If you have any questions, or you need some technical help with Laravel, just join me on my Linkedin:
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