The updates are never stopping in this digital era. Every day new technology is introduced so it becomes quite tough to choose the best framework for your upcoming projects.

There are plenty of options available in the market. But, selecting the most suitable is daunting for you if you’re not a technical expert.

If you want to create any website or application, just make sure that the framework is easy to understand and user-friendly.

In this piece, I will talk about the world’s easiest and most flexible framework Laravel. It is a PHP web framework which is free and open source. Create anything you want from web applications to complex websites!

Since its introduction in 2011, Laravel has been a constant companion for developers to create beautiful, user-interactive websites.

As per W3Techs latest report, 78.8% of websites use PHP. That means most businesses are hosting their websites on PHP frameworks.

To understand what Laravel is, let’s first get a basic idea of what PHP is.
PHP is ‘Personal Home Page’. To develop a personalized website, PHP is used as the written language.

In this article, you will have all the possible information regarding Laravel development and the best possible reasons that Laravel is the best web framework.

What is laravel

Laravel is a free, open-source PHP Framework to develop websites and web applications created by Tyler Otwell in 2011.

Laravel comes with a Syntax that is powerful enough to make the development process simple, faster, and smoother. Laravel allows you to build sites and applications with the help of its pre-built object-oriented library.

In March 2023, Laravel 10.4 was released with a File: Json() method, converting existing Has Many relationships to a Has One relationship, a new test response assertion, and more.

Laravel helps in simplifying various activities such as navigation, routing, authorization, and others so developers can occupy themselves with making sites or applications more stable and safer from every point.

Laravel is a back-end framework that works on the server side and creates full-stack web applications. That way it can handle both front-end as well as back-end operations.

Thanks to all the pre-built features of Laravel, developers can save time from building a website from scratch, which also saves resources on project development.

Why is laravel the best framework?

According to Wikipedia, “Taylor Otwell created Laravel as an attempt to provide a more advanced alternative to the CodeIgniter framework, which did not provide certain features such as built-in support for user authentication and authorization.”

Its many in-built features are one of the many reasons why developers prefer to use Laravel among many frameworks. Laravel gives developers the flexibility to build different websites.

Laravel is an ideal choice for web development because it follows MVC architecture. its significant documentation and wide range of web application functions improve overall efficiency.

It brings structure to unstructured codes that make a highly secure project, its robust security feature makes Laravel a good choice. Laravel competes with 68 competitor tools in the programming framework category and maintains the title of being the easy-to-use framework tool of all.

Currently, Laravel is hosted on GitHub. There are 72.8k stars and 23.5k forks available on GitHub.

As per the data received from Google Trends, Laravel has been one of the most used web frameworks for the past 5 years.

While compared to other Popular PHP frameworks, 47.3% of all websites are built using Laravel.

According to data available on GitHub 711,178 Live Websites are currently using Laravel, while more than 15 million websites are hosted on Laravel.

The popularity of Laravel has grown by 37% in a single year. Laravel has been more demanding than other PHP frameworks.

The top 10% of developers were using Laravel in 2022.

Web development is the largest industry using Laravel with 2357 customers, followed by digital marketing with 1787, and software development with 1717 customers. While e-Commerce is the smallest industry using Laravel with 1062 customers.

USA is the biggest user of Laravel Development services with 21.98% of all customers, followed by India and the United Kingdom with 8.75% and 7.77% customers respectively.

Why use laravel framework for web developments: top features?

Before Laravel was introduced, CodeIgniter was one of the best frameworks available for web development. But there were a few features that CodeIgniter did not provide such as Built-in support for Authentication and Authorization.

1. Query Builder
2. Open Source
3. Object-Oriented Libraries
4. IoT Integration
5. Multilingual website
6. Command-line Interface (CLI)
7. MVC Architecture

Query builder

Since Laravel 3, a new feature Query Builder has been available to provide more direct database access. Laravel’s query builder provides classes and methods that are capable of building queries programmatically.

Open source

Laravel is an open-source PHP web framework and is free. That means you can start your project immediately without worrying about the cost. Projects built on Laravel can be maintained easily over the years and are cost-effective.

Object-oriented libraries

Laravel has object-oriented, pre-populated libraries that can be used to implement several different features into your development.

This can save time and effort for developers to create object-oriented models and it also brings additional functionalities.

IoT integration

Laravel transfers a large amount of data through IoT devices securely. IoT and PHP are the best combos available for developers. A user can implement an IoT feature into their project to gain more databases.

Multilingual website

Laravel has an excellent routing capability. One of the key benefits is a powerful version of multilingual websites.

You can do your project in multiple languages to attract more customers. With its steady URL redirects, Laravel makes sure that users are landing on the right page in the right language.

Command-line interface (CLI)

command-line-interface (CLI), called Artisan, with a limited set of capabilities was launched in Laravel 3.

Later, the artisan was allowed to incorporate different components from the Symfony framework which was available as an additional feature in Laravel 4.

Usually, Artisan manages database migration, publishes package assets, and generates new codes. It can also implement new custom commands that can be used to automate application-specific tasks.

MVC architecture

Laravel’s MVC architecture makes it an ideal choice for web development because of its significant documentation, and the wide range of web application functions also improves overall efficiency. It brings structure to unstructured codes.

Laravel follows an MVC architectural pattern that specifies a set of rules on how to build scalable and maintainable web apps.

It also helps in bringing consistency and structure to unstructured codes.

What top advantages make it popular?

When creating Laravel, issues with alternative PHP frameworks have been discovered, examined, and rectified. To ensure the safety of your project, Laravel’s Built-in testing feature makes sure that your web application is error-free.

However, there are more reasons of using Laravel to develop your project listed below:

Simplified mail integration

Laravel uses its SwiftMailer library tool to simplify mail API configuration. Laravel. Laravel sends notifications and emails through multiple channels and offers drives for various cloud-based email services.

Secure authentication

Laravel makes it incredibly easy and hassle-free to install a full authentication system. Laravel framework accomplishes different tasks such as logging in, signing up, and resetting the password with the assistance of a single command. It also provides a way to control access and organize authorization logic.

Automated unit and testing features

Laravel’s unit testing features examine the web software’s performance. It shows the overall performance of the application without any glitches or errors.

Developers can easily test and analyze results effectively without spending extra cost or effort. With this built-in security feature, you can save costs on implementing tests on your project.

Traffic-handling

To grow your business, it is important to build a strong website that doesn’t crash under server loads. Laravel has a unique queuing system that can prioritize certain tasks to run faster and postpone certain other tasks.

The framework helps in building a website that handles requests much faster and works smoothly. You can save the extra cost of hosting and implementing other speed optimization techniques.

Caching for better performances

Caching improves the overall performance of any system or application. Laravel supports server-side caching with built-in drivers and also stores cached objects. By appropriate caching, you can improve your application’s backend performance and memory.

Automated task execution and scheduling

Every web application needs to automate tasks when necessary. Such as sending emails, implying new orders into your execution system, or cleaning up junk or cache memory to improve the website’s performance.

Before Laravel was introduced, developers had to generate a Cron entry to schedule each task. Laravel comes with a feature ‘Command Scheduler’ that allows developers to command a schedule and it automatically executes it.

Moreover, it occupies only a single Cron record and reduces the cost of hosting.

Integration of third parties

Your company’s marketing tool, custom payment gateways like PayPal or GooglePay, or a website chat, every company’s website require third-party integration.

If your site demands third-party integration, Laravel offers basic APIs for integration which makes it a solid choice for the process of web development.

Security of web resources

Laravel uses advanced security features such as the Bcrypt hashing algorithm, which never stores passwords in the database.

Laravel’s advanced security features are easy to implement on any website to improve security and fix vulnerabilities before deployment. As a secure framework, Laravel saves developers’ code.

Managing errors

The development of different forms and when the user enters wrong data or doesn’t enter any data at all can cause some inconvenience to developers.

In addition to the built-in library, Laravel also has a built-in error and exception managing module. This means that errors can be solved in real-time and can deliver effective solutions to the customers.

Database migration

In the whole process of creating a full-stack web app, database migration requires more time and effort from developers. Laravel has a built-in database synchronization, which improves the quality and security of the project.

Simplified URL redirect

Laravel’s ability to simplify URLs makes it easier to define and identify routes. URL routing promotes navigation to land users on desired page in the application, it is a critical process while developing a web application. Laravel framework makes the entire process easy.

Cost effective

One of the biggest advantages of using Laravel is, it is a free and open-sourced network. You can use it for free but after hiring a good developer to build your product. Projects on Laravel become cost-efficient as they’re easily developed and maintained over the years. The cost of using the Laravel framework is reduced compared to other back-end frameworks.

Latest updates and new features

Laravel follows the semantic versioning methodology and because of that, it releases every major update in the first quarter, once a year. Although every minor update is released on a needy basis.

It is recommended to use version constraints like ‘^10.0’ when referring to the framework or its components.

The latest version is called Laravel 10, released on February 13, 2023. The previous version, Laravel 9 was released on February 8, 2022, and the next version, Laravel 11 is scheduled to be released on February 6, 2024.

As per official Laravel News, Laravel 9 is scheduled to receive bugs by August 8, 2023, and security fixes until February 14, 2024. Laravel 10 will fix bugs by August 6, 2024, and security fixes until February 14, 2025.

The current Laravel 10 includes a few essential improvements, which will be beneficial to its users.

Let’s take a look at the new features introduced in Laravel 10:

PHP 8.0 support dropped

Laravel has dropped PHP 8.0 and is now supporting PHP 8.1 or 8.2, so you need to upgrade from PHP 8.0. Meanwhile, it is not necessary to immediately update your applications as soon as the new update is released!

Introduced laravel pennant

Laravel Pennant is a feature flag package coming up with Laravel 10. It is a well-built and well-tested package that includes some great functionalities to roll out new features such as A/B test interface designs, maintenance trunk-based development strategies, and more.

Easy process handling

Laravel process services include many features that make testing and running CLI processes easy to use. Laravel offers extensive API for Symphony process methods to run external processes in your projects.

Invoke validation rules

In Laravel 10, Invokable validation rules are default. With Laravel 9, when creating a new invokable rule, an invokable flag was necessary to be added after the artisan command.

This is what you can expect when creating a new rule in Artisan.

artisan make:rule Uppercase

New string password helper

The new Str::password is very useful to create a secure password. This password is inclusive of a random combination of letters, numbers, symbols, and spaces.

Deprecations from Laravel 9:

Few methods are depreciated from Laravel 9.

1. The Route::home method, deprecated in Laravel 9
2. Removed DispatchNow()
3. The MaintenanceModeException class
4. The MocksApplicationServices trait
5. To use $casts instead of the deprecated $dates properly
6. The assertTimesSent method
7. The getBaseQuery has a toBase equivalent

Laravel’s use in the future

Looking at current times, it is safe to say that technology is the future. Laravel is one of the most in-demand frameworks for web applications because of its multiple features and advantages.

Laravel offers everything that is required to develop a full-stack web app to the developer. Laravel has the fastest-growing community that helps solve any problems that arise while developing web applications or websites.

Conclusion

As said earlier, Laravel’s advantages are way more than its drawbacks. Laravel helps in making the process of creating your project hassle-free and easy without losing efficiency.

ViitorCloud offers professional Laravel Web Development Services and expert resources for your software development purposes to create a smooth user experience as per your custom web development requirements.

If you are looking for dedicated a Laravel developer who can help you develop your website or web applications using Laravel, you can contact us as we will provide a solution that fits your requirements and helps you in growing your business.

Hunting for something online is becoming easier day by day, just look up their website and you will know everything about a business.

But to create a user-friendly, and interactive website, robust web development is Important.

One of the crucial steps of creating a website is to choose the best framework for your web development and it also should include coding standards that are understandable and easy to use.

Frameworks that are developed better make it easy for you to focus on other issues of your business rather than only technicalities.

Still, it doesn’t matter if you’re a tech expert or someone who knows veritably little about Laravel. Because in this guide you’ll have all the knowledge related to Laravel.

What is laravel?

Laravel is a free, open-source, PHP web development framework used to create websites and web applications. Based on Symfony, Laravel follows a Model-View-Controller architectural pattern.

In 2011, Tyler Otwell created Laravel to provide a simplified option to make the web development process faster, smoother, and more interesting. Its features such as Artisan CLI have made all the hype about Laravel worth it. Since its creation, 10 versions have been released. Each version was improved and performed better than the previous one. The latest version was released in February 2023.

After getting the basic idea of what Laravel is, the first question that comes to mind is whether it is easy to use. Or is it the same as every other back-end framework that requires difficult coding? Well, to answer your question Laravel comes with a powerful Syntax that makes it easy to use.

Because it has many features that make developers choose Laravel among all other web frameworks.

Top features of laravel

MVC architecture

Laravel follows an MVC architectural pattern that specifies a set of rules on how to build scalable and maintainable web apps. It also helps in bringing consistency and structure to unstructured codes.

Eloquent ORM

Eloquent ORM (object-relational mapping) maintains relationships between database objects to interact easily. An Eloquent model can insert, update, delete, and can also retrieve records from the database table.

Query builder

Query Builder provides more direct database access to the Eloquent ORM. This feature has been available since 2012, Laravel 3. Laravel’s query builder is capable of building queries programmatically using a set of classes and methods.

Application logic

Application logic is implemented either by using controllers or as a part of the route declarations.

Blade

Blade Template Engine provides a set of control structures to internally map its control structures to identify their PHP counterparts. It also combines one or more templates with a data model to produce resulting views.

Statistics on laravel over the years

Now let’s see why Laravel is so popular among developers Globally. Statistics always puts a stronger impression than words.

1. Laravel is licensed by MIT and is currently hosted on GitHub. According to the data, Laravel hosts more than 15 million websites, of which 711,178 are live websites.
2. In 2022, this number was limited to 3,14,995 live websites. That means the popularity of Laravel has grown by 37% in a single year.
3. The top 10% of developers were using Laravel in 2022.
4. The USA alone has 294,413 websites made in Laravel, which makes it the largest user of Laravel Development.
5. 18,535 Websites in India are currently using Laravel.
6. 38,351 Websites are spending more than 1000$ on Laravel

To help you decide better, here’s a list of the benefits of using Laravel.

Benefits of using laravel

1. Simplicity
2. Flexibility
3. Security
4. Automated Testing
5. Cost of websites
6. Easy Maintenance
7. Website Performance
8. Third-party Integration

Simplicity

Laravel is one of the most familiar options available to most developers. Because of its range of built-in templates, it makes it easier for developers to create web developments with less coding. Also, Laravel is free and open source, which is why it is an easy-to-use framework.

Its Built-in file configuration makes it easy to identify and define URL routes. That means there are fewer chances of your URL being redirected.

Flexibility

With the help of its pre-installed, extensive libraries, Laravel allows developers to establish and authenticate a wide range of features for your site.

With the Flexibility that Laravel offers, developers can build a complete e-commerce site or a simple and professional B2B site. You can implement almost any idea into your website without spending tons of money.

Security

In current times, cybercrimes and cyberattacks are increasing day by day. That’s why it becomes so important for businesses to list their products on the most secure platforms and frameworks.

Laravel helps in setting up Advanced security features on any websites and web apps to improve security and protect from hackers and cybercriminals.

To get a little technical, Laravel has a Bcrypt hashing algorithm, which never allows for saving passwords in the database.

Its excellent user authentication and restricted access features are easy to create. And it helps fix security vulnerabilities and technical issues before your website gets deployed.

Automated testing

Laravel has built-in testing features that are used to test the application’s performance efficiency and effectiveness to perform without any errors or glitches. Developers can easily test fundamental user behavior and analyze results by unit testing of applications with their default testing frameworks.

Automated Testing assures faster testing of your project resulting in minimum to zero errors.

Cost of laravel websites

Being a free, open-sourced network is the biggest advantage of using Laravel. You can use it for free but after hiring a good developer to build your product. Projects on Laravel become cost-efficient as they’re easily developed and maintained over the years. The cost of using the Laravel framework is reduced compared to other back-end frameworks.

Easy maintenance

A few standout features of Laravel such as MVC architecture, Blade template engine, and clean code make website maintenance easy.

Ideally, websites and web apps built with Laravel are famous for their Easily maintained feature, but this might not always be true for every other website.

If in the future, you might want to add new features to your already-built websites, it becomes easy to add those features as you could pick up from where the previous development iteration was stopped.

Website performance

If you wish to grow your business, you will have to build a website that is sufficient to control the heavy traffic.

Laravel develops websites that can handle requests much faster than most other frameworks. It enables the ability to control time-consuming tasks, using a unique queuing system that can postpone certain website tasks and handle the rest of the tasks faster. This is how your website runs faster and smoother.

This reduces the overall cost of hosting and implements other speed optimization techniques to keep the server running.

I mean that’s why your website doesn’t crash when a wide range of users access it in a big way.

Third-party integration

Third-party integration has become a requirement for almost every other company’s website. Be it your company’s marketing tool, website chat, or custom payment gateway system.

Laravel’s basic APIs for integration are a solid choice for the web development process if your site demands integration with third-party apps.

Comparison with other back-end frameworks

Nearly 80% of websites use PHP frameworks on their server side.

Comparison with other PHP frameworks as per the data available on builtwith

With 711,178 Websites, Laravel is one of the most preferred frameworks because of its easy-to-use, flexible feature.

Also, it offers easy integration and comes with a built-in library that makes coding seamless.

Laravel offers all these advantages and more and is compatible with use but don’t you get the question in your head are all these theoretical or companies are using it?

top 5 websites built using laravel framework

Invoice Ninja

Invoice Ninja is an open-source invoicing program for businesses and freelancers. It gives a platform to process payments, monitor expenses, and produce custom invoices in one place.

Invoice Ninja uses a SaaS model that gives users the ability to utilize it either via their infrastructure or on a public cloud.

The PHP Framework helps them to attract more users and customize their permission levels.

Alison

Created using Laravel, Alison is one of the largest free e-learning platforms around the globe. It has more than 20 million students in 195 nations enrolled in a wide range of free courses.

This range of online courses and diplomas varies from sales & marketing, IT, Business, Health, Personal Development, Management, and Academics to Engineering.

The Flexibility and scalability feature of Laravel makes the website easily sharable across several platforms and makes it smooth to use.

Barchart

Barchart is one of the best applications created using Laravel for financial information all around the globe.

It is a platform that provides a quick overview of leading stock, forex, and cryptocurrency markets to traders and investors.

For fundamental and technical research of domestic as well as global markets, Barchart has a wonderful collection of tools.

As of January 2021, the platform crossed 3.7 million users.

My Rank

MyRank is another leading eLearning platform built with Laravel Framework. It uses Laravel’s flexibility to the fullest. It mixes usability with an excellent design which makes it a fantastic website.

MyRank is India’s top self-assessment platform. MyRank offers a wide range of online courses to students to achieve their academic goals.

MyRank has around 36, 402 students enrolled, 91,389 queries resolved, and 100, 568 tests taken.

Additionally, the framework allows users to manage an expanding database.

Alphacoders.com

To help writers and content developers connect with their fan base, Alphacoders.com was created through Laravel. Alphacoders.com is an open-source platform created to help creators earn money by monetizing their skills.

It is a great platform to search and use images, avatars, art, and much more content material.

It is very scalable and easily installable. Also, Laravel’s Blade template engine is used here to produce the resulting views

Laravel developer

Learning everything about Laravel was fun and there’s a community of professionals to help you constantly to make your website boost and run smoothly.

Laravel Community is one of the most active communities as it has 44k+ active users worldwide with 18k+ threads and resolves your issue in three days.

Laravel is one of the most famous PHP frameworks, which that means for any difficulty or issue there’s already a solution available on the internet. And it keeps getting updated as the community keeps on adding new functionalities, case scenarios, and features to the online library.

New Aspires can learn easily from the tutorials, articles, and experiences of other developers that are available in the online library.

Future of laravel

Frameworks like Laravel are the future of technology and they aren’t going to vanish anywhere anytime soon. So, this is a great time to start developing your applications with Laravel. It is a perfect choice for high-performance websites and is still maturing with every possible use case available.

Laravel has the most simple, flexible, and practical features which make it the most popular web framework among developers.

Laravel has vast Object-oriented libraries co-existing with pre-installed libraries, that are easy to implement into any web app or website.

From all the mentioned information, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the future of Laravel is going to grow and reach its peak soon and beyond.

Conclusion

In current times, many companies are migrating to Laravel for web application development.

Sure, it has some limitations but that should not stop you from doing any business. Also hiring a good Laravel developer will solve all your problems related to web development.

If your project involves high user traffic, exceptional security features, and heavy data sets, Laravel will serve you in the best way possible.