PHP frameworks we like: Laravel

Benny Alexander September 5, 2014 0 comments

Over the years, a number of different PHP frameworks have released for general use. At Macronimous we keep learning and building PHP frameworks such as CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Yii and Zend Each of these has their own strengths and weaknesses, and only a few have managed to stand out and attract widespread use from developers. One of the newer PHP frameworks that have delivered the goods on every level and taken the PHP development community by storm is Laravel. It is a tidy, functional and feature-rich PHP framework that developers around the world have embraced and made a part of their application development arsenal. The kind of power, flexibility, and ease it provides the developers have rarely been matched by other frameworks, and it is one of the handiest tools in the toolbox of the web application developer today.

Strong Points

Laravel has a number of critical advantages over most other popular PHP frameworks. These include –

• A large number of easily deployable bundled features which can be used out of the box or with modifications with application development. A modular packaging system makes things easy for developers.
• It supports easy migration of code and projects from other popular PHP frameworks like CodeIgniter.
• While most other PHP frameworks lack native support for authentication, Laravel includes a simple, easy to use authentication class that gives developers out of the box functionality, while also being easily customizable, configurable and extendible.
• One of the common problems plaguing PHP frameworks is the problem of duplicate or redundant form submissions. With Laravel, these problems no longer occur as it supports the widely used and successful POST – REDIRECT – GET pattern for form submissions. The Redirect class in Laravel has included chainable methods that make form development a breeze.
• For those who like clean routes while writing functions and controllers, Laravel has an intuitive and simple filter system which enables developers to couple functions with certain specific routes. Functions can be grouped, attached together with other functions or mapped before or after the specified route. There is also the option to declare global filters which are effective for the entire application, either before or after the flow of the application.
• Another feature which makes keeping things clean and separate easier is the immensely powerful event mechanism which is integrated into Laravel. Here, it is easy to declare a particular event that can be listened to by other classes. There is also the option to assign global system events which can be used for important actions like performance monitoring.
• It is easy to inject and include classes and third party libraries into Laravel projects with the use of its IOC Container feature. This makes it easy for developers to incorporate external classes directly into their controllers.
• Laravel includes a well-built and powerful ORM which works out of the box and includes features like relationships, lazy and eager loading, pivots, automatic time stamps and CRUD.
• It offers integrated, native support for secure HTTP protocol as Laravel allows developers to define HTTPS routes.
• It provides easy unit testing of code with the powerful and comprehensive Artisan CLI.

After 2009 we decided to use a use a PHP framework of our choice when we go for custom PHP Application development. This was a wise decision, and Laravel was a recent addition that makes every project a delight.