Why We Love Laravel For Building Websites
Laravel is the world’s most popular PHP framework with some estimated 30,000 developers across the globe. At Bigger Picture, we love using Laravel to build websites for our clients. ‘Why is it so great?’ we hear you ask. Laravel is a beautifully elegant and amazingly simple to use framework. It allows developers to quickly create web applications that are easy to maintain. But before we get too deep into the detail, a quick guide for the uninitiated on what a PHP framework even is.
What Is a PHP Framework?
Glad you asked. PHP is the world’s most popular scripting language and it is wonderfully suited to web development. It is open-source (meaning anyone can access and use it), easy to use and incredibly flexible. It can also be embedded into HTML which is the coding language we use to build web pages. The problem with PHP is that it can get very monotonous and repetitive to code with. Which is why we use PHP frameworks. They streamline the whole process by providing basic structures to build web applications within. This saves time, primarily, but also builds more stable applications and importantly, keeps web developers from going mad!
Now that we’re up to speed, let’s get back to why we love using Laravel.
The Popular Kid
Laravel’s popularity is good for more than just peace of mind. The fact that it is so popular is testament to its ease-of-use and quality, and that’s always good news. But using a popular framework also confers other benefits. For a start it means it is incredibly well tested, other issues and problems have already been spotted and resolved. Speaking of testing, Laravel has testing integrated into its framework, so you can be sure your web application will be bug-free.
Laravel Development is Quick and Intuitive
Laravel works on a modular basis. Meaning there are a lot of pre-built functions and structures available. Because it is open-source developers have been improving these resources since Laravel became available in 2011. This means it’s quick and intuitive for our developers to build websites using the PHP framework. There’s no need to spend hours and weeks writing out individual lines of code. That’s time saved for our developers, and money saved for our clients.
The Code is Elegant
That sounds like we’re trying to make it fancy, doesn’t it? But elegant is absolutely the right word to describe the code of Laravel. It is simple, and easy to understand, whilst being able to handle complex tasks. The simplicity of Laravel means the code is easy to read, so developers who haven’t worked on that code previously will easily be able to get a handle on what’s going on.
Flexible and Versatile
Another time and stress saving attribute of Laravel is its database abstraction layer. In simple terms, this means that applications or websites built with Laravel can be written without any assumptions on the specific database used. i.e. SQL Server or Maria DB. This makes it flexible, and far easier to upgrade a website or even migrate it. The code is not fussy.
Authentication and Authorisation
Laravel makes it incredibly simple to set up a complete authentication system, complete with login, registration and password reset. Amazingly it does all this with one simple command. As well as this, Laravel also allows developers to easily specify what permissions each user has. All with simple commands.
If you asked our developers, they could regale you for hours and hours about the benefits of using Laravel and why we love it so much. We’ve only picked out a few today, there are countless more, but these are some of our favourite reasons. We have mentioned how popular Laravel is and there is obviously a reason behind this (it’s a great PHP framework!). It also means that Laravel has one of the biggest and most active communities you will find in the web development industry. They even run yearly Laravel conferences…
We could drone on and on about how wonderful Laravel is until the cows came home. Fundamentally though, it allows us to build beautiful and engaging websites for our clients. And that’s what this is all about.