[Learning Laravel Series] What is Laravel?

Laravel 5, Best PHP Framework Learning Series

Introduction

This will be a series of posts on different topics on Laravel. I recently started learning Laravel, so I’m going to write a post whenever I see something that’s cool or encounter a new feature of Laravel.

What is Laravel ?

Laravel is a full stack PHP MVC framework for rapid web app development. Laravel is full of featured and highly opinionated, so we must fully its rules for development.

Laravel Flow

Features

• Artisan commands: Laravel provide us with tools called artisan so we can generate files fast and error-less. For example, we can generate a Post model file with the following command.

php artisan make:model Posts

• Routing: Laravel has an easy yet powerful route mapping system. We can quickly map routes with our controller. We can also separate routes into API routes and web-routes.
• Blade Template: Blade template is a simple template system for Laravel. Every MVC framework has their own template system. Ex. rails has ERB, express has EJS. Blade works really similar to them. So if you worked with any other template system. You should find blade really easy to pick up.
• Eloquent ORM: This is a tool that Laravel provides so we can use simple queries as a replacement for SQL queries. An example of Eloquent would be the code below.

Post::all()
Select * from post

• Migration: Laravel also supports migration. Migration provides an easy database creation and modification. With migration, we also have a log of schema changes.
• Deployment: Deployment with Laravel is relatively easy compared to other languages. Because of PHP, PHP can easily deploy. We can even use FTP and shared hosting to host our web app.

Conclusion

Laravel is a heavyweight framework so it provides a lot of tools for developers to use. We can also use Laravel for API and use whatever front-end framework that we want to use. In the following posts, I’ll dive deeper into each Laravel topic or tricks.