PHP is one of the oldest and most popular web development languages, and Laravel is the most popular framework. more than 56 000 developers from all over the world (mostly from the USA) greatly appreciate the robust features of this platform. Although the general criteria for a development team to choose the framework are – the cost of development, their experience with it, the popularity of the framework, etc., there are several other factors like third-party integrations, deployment, testing and many more that need deliberate consideration. So today, in this article we will be discussing what are the major technical advantages which make Laravel the best out of all.
10 Reasons Why You Should Use Laravel PHP Framework in 2020
1. User Authentication Out Of The Box
Laravel offers user authentication out of the box. Any modern-day web application would need user authentication, and you hardly have to do anything to set this up with laravel framework. When you set up user authentication, Laravel creates all the important components such as the user model, the register and the login controller and corresponding views as well. It is super easy to extend any of these components to further add functionality as per the desired business logic of your application.
Apart from this, Laravel also offers the socialite package, which enables your application to authenticate users using various social networks such as Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter. There is a bare minimum configuration that you have to do to get this working.
2. Convention Over Configuration Approach
Laravel also focuses on convention over configuration approach. This essentially means that if you follow the naming conventions for different components, you hardly have to focus on the configuration. If you follow the naming convention Laravel itself takes care of many low-level details, and everything starts working magically. If you are coming from a conventional PHP programming background, this might seem overwhelming to you in the beginning. But once you get the hook of it, you would not want to go back ever again.
3. Easy Notification Emails
It’s impossible to imagine any modern-day application without email notifications. With Laravel sending out email notifications is super easy. Apart from SMTP and Php mail function, Laravel provides support for various notification email services such as Mailgun, Mandrill, SparkPost, Amazon SES, SendMail etc. These services enable you to start sending mail through a local or cloud-based service quickly. You can also send notifications Via Slack and SMS using Nexmo. All these services are supported out of the box.
Laravel also supports markdown in email templates which enables you to create notification emails in a fraction of time.
4. Artisan Commands
Artisan for me is the most elegant and useful feature offered by Laravel. Artisan is the command-line interface for Laravel and helps developers to automate many tasks using the command line itself. Artisan commands can be used within the application itself, and Developers can also create additional Artisan commands.
There is an Artisan command for all the common tasks that you can think of, such as, creating a model, creating a controller, creating a database seeder, migrating the database, so on and so forth. The list is endless. Why I say it’s elegant is because all you have to do is pass command and Laravel takes care of it.
5. Testing Automation For Test Driven Development
Laravel supports PHPUnit out of the box and makes test-driven development for PHP applications super easy. It’s easy to write unit tests for your application and ensure that things are working the way you want them to.
6. Elegant Dependency Injection
Once you start working with Laravel, you would soon realise that Laravel gets it inspiration from Ruby on rails and more functional languages rather than Java. It’s evident even from the way Laravel handles dependency injections. Though it is possible to achieve complex patterns when it comes to dependency injection, contrary to that, Laravel offers simple methods to create global helper functions. With the help of global functions and facades, one can easily include dependencies wherever needed.
7. Separation Of Business Logic And Presentation Code
Laravel follows a Model View Controller (MVC) architectural pattern and hence separates the business logic from the view. This approach has various advantages. Though you need to understand what Model-View-Controller (MVC) is to understand the benefits, and whether your application requires such an architectural pattern or not.
8. The Eloquent ORM
Eloquent is laravel ORM (Object Relationship Mapping) more information
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-relational_mapping . Eloquent makes fetching data from the database super easy. Creating relationships between tables and fetching data from these tables is facilitated by Eloquent as well. Eloquent also lets you create various joins in tables and offers many helper functions which make interacting with database super easy. You hardly ever have to write SQL queries or functions. Thanks to Eloquent Laravel offers out of the box support for these databases:
– MySQL
– PostgreSQL
– SQLite
– SQL Server
You guessed it right, this essentially means that as long as you using Eloquent you don’t have to worry about compatibility with any of the above databases. Also making a switch from one database to another is super easy. Now try to imagine the scalability that this gives to your application. Let me explain that with an example, let’s assume you start with an application which has a small user base in the beginning. Since the number of users is less and the app is in its initial stages, you decide to use MySQL as the database. Later on, the user base of your application grows to a considerable level, and you might have to switch SQL Server as your database. Making this change is as easy as changing specific configuration details in Laravel.
9. Ques And Scheduler
While developing an application, there are often certain time-consuming tasks. These tasks need to be deferred to a later time so that they do not create a bottleneck in the user’s process. A perfect example of this sort of a task may be the generation of a PDF report a CSV file that the user has requested. Laravel’s queue service provides a unified API to defer such tasks for a later stage in the application.
Talking about Laravel’s Command Scheduler, it’s a perfect replacement for those fussy Cron Jobs. Many times there are specific tasks for which developers have to set up Cron jobs. A perfect example of such a task would be sending out weekly newsletters to all the subscribers. For setting up the cron jobs, the developers have to login into the server using SSH and set up the cron jobs at the machine level. This becomes a hassle over a period of time because these cron jobs are not a part of the version control system such as GIT. Laravel’s Command Scheduler provides a clean API schedule various tasks using the inbuilt functions. You don’t have to log in to your machine’s terminal using SSH, and all these scheduled jobs are a part of your code.
10. Clean And Simple Routing
The way Laravel handles routing is straightforward and intuitive. There is a single web.php file to handle all your web routes. If certain routes required common middleware, they could be grouped easily in Laravel.
A perfect example of this would be certain pages in your application, which requires user authentication before the user can view them. All these pages can be grouped and go through the Auth middleware to ensure that these pages can be viewed only by users who have logged into the system. Laravel also offers an elegant route model binding wherein a model can be bound to a route. With the help of this, a view can be returned directly from the route itself without even accessing the controller.