Laravel

Laravel is open source PHP Framework, which is intended for web application development. Taylor Otwell is its developer. First release was in 2012. It has a MIT license. It uses MVC software architecture, i. e. Model-View-Controller. It is typical with being optimized pro real world and offers many procedures, which are often used during the web application development.

Basic functions of Laravel

Framework Laravel contains the following basic functions and many more:

Authentication. It controls the users’ access.
Caching. It allows caching of the used data.
Database. It offers wide scale of tools that are needed for communication with database.
Mailing. Laravel allows sending emails including attachments and inserted files.
Routing. Laravel accesses management, routing and processing queries in one place.
Sessions. Laravel can take care of an agenda connected with the sessions.

Laravel’s basic building blocks

Laravel comes from framework’s giants and support systems, as are Symfony, Composer, Eloquent ORM or Blade. It draws inspiration from Ruby on Rails, APS.NET or Sinatra, when it comes to open procedures.

Basic building block is Sympfony, which provides many important modules as are Browserkit, Console, Debug or FileSystem. Other significant component is Composer, i. e. PHP dependencies manager.

Advantages of using Laravel

Using the newest PHP functionalities. One feature, which distinguishes Laravel from other Frameworks is that it uses the newest PHP functionalities. The other frameworks don’t do that.
Great documentation. Laravel’s documentation makes its usage truly user friendly. All Laravel versions are released including the complete documentation, where you can find good detail explanation of the programming style, methods and classes.
Integration with mailing services. It is needed for the web apps to maintain the users informed about the new offers. Another important stage in life cycle of customer is his registration, with which connects the notification email. Framework is equipped with clear API with the usage of SwiftMailer library. It also has drivers for SMTP, Mailgun, SparkPost, Mandrill, PHP mail function, Amazon SES or Sendmail. All those can help with sending emails through cloud or local services.
Support of popular caching backends. Laravel supports cache backends as are e. g. Memcached or Redis. It is also possible to configurate many cache configurations.
Built-in tool for command line. Developers don’t like to deal with repeating actions, because they take up too much time. The tool for command line named Artisan helps to create the code’s skeleton and manage the database system. Artisan also helps with generating basic MVC files and the source management including their configuration.
Packages and source availability. You can use packages, which combine Laravel with Gulp or elixir. It helps with solving dependencies.
Reduction of the product development cycle. It is possible to significantly shorten the product development cycle, because the integration will speed up. The Laravel also has huge community support.
IoC container. Inversion of Control is a method, which generates new objects. These objects are available, whenever you write code.
Reverse routing. It is possible to create links to named routs.
ORM. Simple implementation ActiveRecord allows pleasant work with database.

Disadvantages of working with Laravel

It doesn’t support payment gateways functionality. It is possible to use services, which the payments mediate, by which can this problem be avoided.
Missing continuity among versions. Individual Laravel versions don’t link to each other very well.
Variableness of quality. Some components aren’t very well designed.
Some actualizations are problematic. Before actualizations implementation is needed to accept appropriate measures.
Support of mobile applications. Full reloading of a page can be, opposed to the desktop browser in mobile phone, relatively difficult. In case of mobile apps, it is often needed to solve frontend in another way.