Brief introduction to the Laravel framework
Tags: laravel, beginners, webdev, codenewbie
Published: 2022-06-27 11:51:38

In recent years, web development has gradually shifted from writing plain languages to frameworks and content management systems (CMS), even newbies can build websites with the likes of WordPress. Wix, Bubble, etc.

For the more advanced developers, there has been a significant shift to frameworks such as React, Vue etc for JavaScript while Django and Flask for web development with Python. For PHP, one framework that has stood out is Laravel.

## What is Laravel?

Laravel is a free, open source PHP framework, created by Taylor Otwell. It is described as a progressive framework, this is because it’s suitable for any developer the skill level not withstanding; whether you’re new to PHP frameworks or have years of experience with PHP frameworks. Laravel allows a developer to take advantage of large libraries of pre-programmed functionalities (including but not limited to authentication, routing,  HTML templating and dockerizing). Access to these libraries make it easy to build robust web applications in a short time. 

Laravel strives to provide an amazing developer experience while providing powerful features such as thorough dependency injection, an expressive database abstraction layer, queues and scheduled jobs, unit and integration testing, and more. It uses object-relationship mapping (ORM) for simplifying data access and manipulation; Eloquent ORM is the ORM tool used in Laravel.

Laravel applications are highly scalable and have easy-to-maintain codebases. Developers can also seamlessly add functionalities to applications, thanks to Laravel’s modular packaging and robust dependency management system. Like most PHP frameworks, Laravel uses a Model-View-Controller MVC architecture. In the MVC architecture, the Model component corresponds to all the data-related logic that the user works with. A table of all users for example, can be a model. The View component is used for all the UI logic of the application, this is where the user can view and modify data in the model. The controller is the connector between the model and view components, to process all the business logic, incoming requests and also manipulate data. 

Laravel uses a templating engine called Blade, one of the advantage over other templating engines is that it supports the use of raw PHP syntax using the `@php` directive a feature not found in other templating engines.


The first version of Laravel was released on June 9, 2011 and since then it has grown to become the most widely used PHP framework. It has over 70,000 stars on [GitHub](https://github.com/laravel/laravel) and over 600 contributors, it is one of the PHP frameworks with the highest community of developers.

![Laravel statistics over time](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/hj4agvquvn5xd8wedxx6.png)

**What can I build with Laravel**

You can create any modern type of website with the laravel framework, which is suitable for both small and large scale projects. With this versatile framework, you can build any kind of web applications and APIs; some flutter applications utilize a Laravel API for their backend.
Laravel makes it easy for you to develop & maintain any high quality and scalable web applications with minimal stress.

It's MVC architecture is great from a developer’s perspective, and its convenient shortcuts for frequent programming tasks, clear conventions for how to solve the problems, and it's tightly integrated unit testing support give you the tools you need to build any application.

**Official Laravel Communities and Resources:**

- [Official Laravel Docs](https://laravel.com/docs/9.x)
- [Laracasts Forum](https://laracasts.com/discuss)
- [Laravel io](https://laravel.io/forum)
- [Laravel GitHub](https://github.com/laravel/laravel)
- [Twitter](https://twitter.com/laravelphp)

**Conclusion**
Laravel is one of the best PHP Frameworks. It has a large community and it is also easy to learn. There are plenty of the laravel tutorials available on the internet. In the next article, I’ll be talking about how to setup Laravel on your system and subsequently, I will be creating web applications to showcase the versatility of Laravel.