Laravel – The PHP Framework For Web Artisans
Laravel is an open source MVC Web Framework written in PHP. Laravel was founded by Taylor Otwell in June 2011. Laravel was intended for web development following ultra modern MVC (Model-View-Controller) with modular packaging system. Actually it’s partially based on Symfony. It has a dedicated dependency manager, different ways to interact with database such as Elloquent ORM. The source code of Laravel is hosted on GitHub – The world’s leading software development platform. Laravel licensed under the terms of MIT License.History of Laravel:-
Laravel was created to provide a more advanced alternative to the one of the oldest and simple PHP framework named “CodeIgniter” which didn’t provide many features such as authentication, authorization for application users.Laravel first Beta version was released on 11th June 2011 with some built-in support such as authentication, localisation, models, views, sessions, routing and other mechanisms but lacked support for controllers that averted it from being a true MVC framework.
Laravel 2 was released in September 2011 with major new features with built-in support for Controllers, & this made Laravel a fully sophisticated MVC framework. In Laravel 2 the support for third party package was removed. In Laravel 2 there was built in support for Inversion of Control(IoC) principle and a templating system called Blade.
Laravel 3 was released in February, 2012 with a set of new features such as CLI(Command Line Interface) named “Artisan”, built-in support for various database management systems, database migration, handling events, and a packaging system called Bundles.
Laravel 4 which also known as its code name by “Illuminate” was released in May, 2013. The new features in Laravel 4 was database seeding, support of message queues and also had built-in support to send different types of email, and support for delayed deletion of database records named soft deletion.
Laravel 5 was released in February, 2015 with some new features like support for scheduling periodically executed tasks through a package called “Scheduler”, an abstract layer called “File System” that means remote storage can be used in the same way as local file systems. In Laravel 5 a new internal directory tree structure was introduced for developed applications.
Laravel was announced as a most popular PHP Framework by SitePoint survey in March 2015
Laravel 5.1 released in June 2015 it is the first version of Laravel LTS(Long Time Support). with planned availability of bug fixes for 2 years and also planned security patches for 3 years. LTS releases of Laravel are planned to be released every two years.
Laravel 5.3, released on August 23, 2016. The new features in 5.3 were focused on improving the application developer speed by adding additional out of the box improvements for common tasks.
Laravel 5.4, released on January 24, 2017. This release had so many new features, like Dusk, Mix, Blade Components and Slots, Markdown Emails, Automatic Facades, Route Improvements, Higher Order Messaging for Collections, and many others.
Laravel 5.5, released on August 30, 2017. Laravel 5.6, released on February 7, 2018. Laravel 5.7, released on September 4, 2018.
| Version | Release date | PHP version | Notes |
| 1.0 | June 2011 | NA | |
| 2.0 | September 2011 | NA | |
| 3.0 | February 22, 2012 | NA | |
| 3.1 | March 27, 2012 | NA | |
| 3.2 | May 22, 2012 | NA | |
| 4.0 | May 28, 2013 | ≥ 5.3.0 | NA |
| 4.1 | December 12, 2013 | ≥ 5.3.0 | NA |
| 4.2 | June 1, 2014 | ≥ 5.4.0 | NA |
| 5.0 | February 4, 2015 | ≥ 5.4.0 | NA |
| 5.1 LTS | June 9, 2015 | ≥ 5.5.9 | NA |
| 5.2 | December 21, 2015 | ≥ 5.5.9 | NA |
| 5.3 | August 23, 2016 | ≥ 5.6.4 | NA |
| 5.4 | January 24, 2017 | ≥ 5.6.4 | NA |
| 5.5 LTS | August 30, 2017 | ≥ 7.0.0 | NA |
| 5.6 | February 7, 2018 | ≥ 7.1.3 | NA |
| 5.7 | September 4, 2018 | ≥ 7.1.3 | NA |
Laravel: The Pros
- Laravel has its built-in light weight templating engine named “Blade” which helps to speed up compiling task and create layouts with dynamic content easily.
- Hassles code reusability.
- Eloquent ORM with PHP active record implementation
- Laravel has a built-in command line tool for creating code skeleton, database structure and populating data into database which is known as “Artisan”.
Laravel: The Cons
- To Develop any application in Laravel, you must have strong knowledge in Custom PHP, MySQL, Database Relations, OOP.
- Laravel is the new Framework and composer which is not strong in comparison to npm (for node.js), ruby gems and python pip.
- To Develop an Application whether it’s a web application or ERP, Laravel is not so fast in comparison to ruby on rails.
- Laravel has less inbuilt support rather than Django and rails. But this particular problem can be solved by integrating various third-party tools, but for large and very custom websites it can create many problems.
