Why you should use Laravel for development of scalable solutions
PHP, one of the most famous frameworks for web development has several wonderful frameworks within itself. Laravel, founded and developed by Taylor Otwell, is one such framework and since it is infused with many different features and functionalities, it has become one of the best. A noted feature of Laravel is that there is a whole community for support, and so, when in doubt, all you need to do is just pop in there and all your problems will be instantly cleared. Laravel is thus open source, and has expressive and elegant syntax that makes it easy and quick. If you’ve got a project you want to finish on time, you can definitely get it done with Laravel. That is one reason why you should use Laravel for developing scalable solutions. Let’s look at other reasons as well:
Taylor Otwell
He is a great programmer, and he’s got an intuitive and almost innovative way of making things easy and digestible. A programmer just entering into the world of web development can feel his around Laravel because it is much more organised, and the attention to detail is impeccable. Hence, the excellent documentation of Laravel is what makes it really special, and the one person behind it is Taylor Otwell. The docs are crystal clear on documentation and validation, and you can easily refer to the docs when you want to add something, something as trivial as adding a checkbox on a registration form for users to check on. Safari doesn’t support the HTML 5 required tag, but with Laravel’s documentation, you can add the checkboxes.
Laracasts
Laravel is easy, but if you still need to learn how to use it then you can rely on free and paid videos featured by Jeffery Way, who is an expert at Laravel functionalities and a great instructor. You have access to a plethora of tutorials that will give you in-depth knowledge on mastering your IDE, tips on using VUE.js, and even a whole series on using fundamentals like design patterns and common expressions. You can subscribe to Laravel and get inputs from it when in doubt. Whenever Laravel comes up with new features, it will always be followed by tutorials. Yes, it does cost money to view many of the videos, but it is definitely worth the expense.
Intuitive syntax
The syntax of Laravel is very easy to understand. Taylor Otwell adopted the same principles that was mentioned in the highly acclaimed book Clean Code by Robert C. Martin. It talks about writing descriptive code that’s focussed on the task. This leads to clearer and more maintainable codes.
Here is an example of pagination –
Pagination here is set to 5 and Role is the model here. It’s basic pagination and quite easy to understand.
Another example:
Here findOrFail is being used to return a single model instance. If it comes back with ‘no result’, a ModelNotFoundException comes out. This makes it quite easy to handle with a pretty view page.
(Courtesy: http://www.evontech.com/what-we-are-saying/entry/why-laravel-is-the-most-preferred-framework-of-php-developers.html )
It helps you to make scalable apps
When a number of tasks are being run in the background, you cannot afford to have users waiting endlessly. The good thing with Laravel is that it supports many different queue drivers and would help them use even complex applications with ease. Using Beanskatlk or IronMQ would be advisable. Here is how a basic usage with Beanstalk would look like: change /app/config/queue.php to specify your default queue driver and any config, including the name of a queue:
‘default’ => ‘beanstalkd’,
‘beanstalkd’ => array(
‘driver’ => ‘beanstalkd’,
‘host’ => ‘localhost’,
‘queue’ => array(‘default’,’SendEmail’),
),
Then, within your controller, you could do the following to push to that
queue:
Queue::push(‘SendEmail’, array(‘message’ => ‘Something…’));
(Courtesy: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23448715/scalability-oflaravel-web-app).
Artisan
There is a built-in command-line interface tool called Artisan and it generates codes that developers had had to create manually. It also eliminates the need to perform repetitive tasks and tedious programming tasks, while generating controllers and models have become easier. Artisan is driven by a very powerful Symphony Console component. Typing the command “php artisan list” would help you see a list of all available Artisan commands. Laravel has a command scheduler that lets you fluently and expressively define your command schedule inside Larevel and you need just a single Cron entry on your server for this. The Cron entry to be added is this. – * * * * * php /path/to/artisan schedule:run 1>> /dev/null 2>&1. This entry will call the Laravel command scheduler every minute and the framework will evaluate all scheduled jobs, and perform all the jobs that are due.
(Courtesy – https://laravel.com/docs/5.0/artisan)
Blade Templating
By default, Laravel comes fully equipped with blade template engine, allowing you to use plain php code in your application. And it doesn’t add any overhead to your application. The templating engine is highly intuitive, and developers can easily work with even typical PHP/HTML spaghetti. There are inbuilt lightweight templates that allow developers to create amazing layouts with the help of dynamic content seeding. Additionally, it allows developers to incorporate CSS and JS code with solid structures.
Here are the main benefits of using blades:
- Define sections
- Extend views
- Echo & escaping Conditional statements
- Looping & Includes
Excellent authentication techniques
Laravel is well known for its authentication techniques as it brilliantly configures almost everything, right from organizing authorization logic or providing control over access to resources. There are two primary ways in which Laravel’s To authorize action functions – They are gates and policies acting as routes and controllers. Laravel also comes with Middleware that makes it easy to verify HTTP requests before sending them to controllers.
Laravel security
When security is extremely important while making scalable apps, Laravel comes to your rescue. It uses salted and hashed passwords, which is mainly Bcrypt hashtag for storing user passwords. Laravel also comes with built-in LoginController and ResgiterController classes for protection against injection and xss attacks. No more complex coding for site security is necessary when
Laravel is at work.
Have you ever thought about using Laravel for PHP development? Do you think it would help you greatly in building scalable apps? Please share your views in the command box below. If you are looking for highly skilled Laravel developers, don’t hesitate to contact us.
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About the author: Reema works as Thought Leader at PHPBabu.
