Laravel: Dissecting The Backend Frameworks in Detail

In today’s world, everything we see is digital, especially online. And a small part of this platform is web applications. Although developing web applications takes a lot of effort and time, some developers depend on frameworks. Not only a few frameworks nowadays; a variety of frameworks are available for backend web applications. Choosing the proper backend framework can be confusing for any developer, which is why in this blog, we have come up with the most popular backend framework, Laravel framework.

Laravel: An Overview

Laravel provides simple, flexible architecture and unique tools for building applications. Laravel is a PHP framework that has become among the most popular frameworks. And the reason the laravel framework is the most emerging trend is its expressive and elegant syntax, which lets the developers write clean code, test it and maintain it nicely.

 One of the best development trends of Laravel 2023 is its new security measures that will let you encrypt your database or provide extra protection by firewall or IDS. The rapid development of the application creates a full-fledged application without including complex tools, APIs, or other elements. 

A Basic Guide discussing Laravel Meaning and Facts

We know that laravel is the best framework for developing web applications. But a question must have arisen to you: what is laravel?

Laravel is an open-source PHP framework that takes care of many tasks carried out on web projects. Those tasks are server-side routing, HTML authentication, templating, caching, etc. 

In June 2011, laravel was created by Taylor Otwell. It is written in PHP and based on Symfony, which offers reusable PHP components and libraries that help build website applications, along with various features such as pre-defined architecture, web portals, templates, personalized backend logic, full-stack apps, and managing SaaS products. Those applications related to content management systems use the Laravel framework because it has built-in features that simplify the process and shorten the time required for development in-app.

Factsheet of Laravel

• In India, the number of live websites currently using Laravel is 761,321.

• The top industries that use Laravel are Web Development (2710), Digital Marketing (1923), and Software Development (1845).

• 38.86 percent of Laravel framework users’ primary operating system is macOS. Additionally, 45.86 percent of users have 2-5 years of experience using Laravel.

Use cases of Laravel

• Laravel framework builds SaaS-based applications, web portals, APIs, and templates.
• Web application management and helps in site maintenance and feature enhancements.
• Online learning service applications.
• Design web apps combined with external plug-ins and add-ons.
• Secure application development with structured SQL, hashed secret words, and Bycript hashing computation.
• The web management system is based on stock trading.
• Laravel builds a multilingual content management system.
• Timesaving pre-built applications.
• Reward and recognition features are present in web applications.

Apps using Laravel

• Laracasts: An online learning website that provides courses on topics like AlpineJS, Authentication, JavaScript, MySQL, and many more.
• AlphaCoders is a platform for content writers to help them connect to their fans.
• Invoice Ninja: It is an open-source solution created to help in the payment process, manage expenses, and generate custom invoices for businesses.
• World Walking: The inspiring platform for people to walk. Including walking challenges and rewards will motivate you to make walking a daily habit.
• October CMS: It is a trusted, self-hosted, open-source, and free CMS platform famous for its reuse code capability.
•  Cachet: It is used to find errors and problems with websites.

Pros of Laravel

• URL Routing: One of the advantages of Laravel is URL Routing, in which the feature Reverse Routing supports automatic change in routs into URLs.
• Automated Testing: Testing methods with PHPUnit enable you to test each component of the application and imitate user behaviors like clicking forms, making requests, analyzing the output, and so forth for doing expressive testing. It is simple and less time-consuming testing and is also automated.
• Traffic management: Traffic hosting can be costly by handling more requests per second in the web application if more traffic appears. To avoid this situation, the PHP Laravel framework supports a traffic load balancing system known as a message queue system. It helps in maintaining web servers and traffic management.
• Authentication and Authorization: The authentication system in the Laravel framework is easy to execute and includes registration, login, and reset passwords. A single command is enough for Laravel to execute all this work.
• Multi-lingual applications: Users can choose their native language while accessing a web page. This is one of the Laravel project examples.
• Pre-built tools: Pre-built tools are readymade tools required when building a web application that a developer can use without providing monotonous input repeatedly. 
• Templates and layouts: Blade’s laravel templating engine offers easy templating and a complex web application.

Technical Specifications of Laravel

Laravel is a highly used, open-source web application framework. That makes it an easily customized web application. It is used for minor to significant projects and provides quality outputs. Moreover, technical specifications like performance, architecture, scalability, testing, and database support bring perfection to building web applications.

Performance

The two factors of success of any business are performance and optimization. Thus, improving performance is a skill that a developer should be able to deliver to clients. We all know that Laravel contributes more to building a business information system; thus, being fast and well-performed is necessary for the framework.

Some ways of improving performance are:

• Config Caching: Artisan Cached config in Laravel helps in improving performance. The usage of this config is if you cache the config, the other changes don’t affect it.
• Routes Caching: The apps having a bunch of routes need routs caching. These are the fast-loading arrays that help improve the Laravel framework’s performance.
• Remove unused services: It is always advised to disable new services from the config files to improve performance.
• Limit included libraries: laravel lets an app include many libraries. But that also comes with the disadvantage of slowing the performance. Therefore, remove it from the applications if you don’t feel like you require a library.

Architecture

The architecture followed by laravel is MVC. After breaking down, it is called Model View Controller. It is an architecture that separates the user interface from the domain, application, and business logic. To do so, it divides the application into three parts:

• Model: It manages the data as well as the fundamental behavior of the web application. By data management, we mean it responds to the information request, responds and changes the state of information, and notifies the developers.
• View: It provides the user-friendly interface of the web application. It will use processed data to form an exemplary user interface.
• Control: It receives the user’s input and uses the model and view to make an output.

Scalability

Scalability is the ability of the system that can handle the increase in the volume of work. Laravel supports businesses that are expanding quickly and also inherits PHP’s scalability. Laravel can accomplish substantial horizontal scaling by choosing an accurate database and load balancer. The scaling methods are MySQL, AWS, and advanced caching.

Testing

Testing gives assurance that your application is error-free. However, it is incredible to know the number of tools preset for testing. For testing, Laravel provides tools you require to test the application in a different environment at several levels, including mock test features. In Laravel, there are different types of testing, such as:

• Unit tests: These show the isolated pieces of your application. PHPUnit can be used to develop unit tests.
• Feature tests: Feature tests are a little different from unit tests. A single feature can depend upon multiple call methods and ensure that the overall quality works in an application. It is compulsory to test the entire flow of the application. Third-party interruption can hamper the testing. Developers can use PHPUnit for feature testing.
• Integration tests: Unlike unit tests, the integration method will make sure to put together those different individual methods and dependencies to accomplish the web application’s functionality.
• Acceptance tests: These ensure the end-to-end application requirements are executed as expected.

Database support

It is an operation that can be carried out within the database structure. Database support such as MySQL, SQLite, SQL, and Postgres. The databases with simple interaction processes are raw SQL, fluent quarry builder, and Eloquent ORM. It is comfortable in making multiple database connections with Larvel.

Quick Summary:

A frontend framework assures you to provide an eye-pleasing web application, but more is needed while developing an application. Choosing the best backend framework is essential to ensure good performance, speed, and a user-friendly web application. And when it comes to best, you can rely on the laravel framework. It is a backend framework that has elegant syntax. It eases the common task of web applications by providing a simple and fast routing engine, database agnostic scheme migrations, real-time event broadcasting, robust background job processing, different testing operations, and much more. 

Also, the 2023 Laravel framework development trends are security, the rapid development of applications, IoT, and the reliability of web applications. The Laravel framework applications include Laracasts, Invoice Ninja, October CMS, and others. The technical specifications present in Laravel let the developer build a well-performed project. Along with performance, it also enables the developer to develop their application with pre-built tools, which makes the job less monotonous and more creative. It also provides tools for testing the application in a much simpler form.

By and large:

Laravel is a suitable framework solution for web application development, as it offers advanced tools and facilities. Also, it is on the lead to using the PHP framework. Moreover, with the growing ecosystem, it will merge among future developers who will appreciate the framework.

The developers always enjoy improving the Larvel framework and the productivity of this backend framework. However, they suspect the new significant change in release in Larvel in the future, which redirects to the framework’s potential and capability.

Choose Laravel, if:

• You want to build an application economically using the Laravel engine known as the Blade template.
• You want to build your application faster with built-in libraries.
• You want to encrypt your database to provide an extra layer of security protection.
• You want your application to interact with physical devices in real-time.
• You want to build web applications with PHP data objects (PDO) based security which prevents the attack of SQL injections and CSRF.