Laravel is a free, open source, PHP framework that allows advanced web development. Some of the most popular and powerful websites are built using PHP, such as Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo, etc. More than 80% of the internet is powered by PHP, and PHP developers are plentiful. With a dozen frameworks available in PHP, it might be confusing to choose the right one. Laravel is the most popular framework today reaching over 32.3k stars on GitHub as of last year, leading by more than double to the second most popular PHP framework. Laravel offers all the tools for ease of use, time efficiency, and great design. Laravel’s features not only benefit your development team, but bring many business advantages as well.
Business Benefits to Laravel:
- Rapid development with MVC Architecture
- Easy to learn
- Large and active developer community
- Advanced Security
Rapid Development with MVC Architecture
Due to Laravels easy-to-use design and quick set up, valuable time is saved during the development life-cycle. Laravel comes with an in-built PHP testing suite, which is important for Test Driven Development. This speeds up development as programmers never have to exit their code editor. Usually, to make a change, one would load the web application in a browser, check if the change worked, then make another change. With Test Driven Development this process is skipped. This, of course, saves time and money. Additionally, Laravel follows the Model-View-Controller pattern, allowing clarity between logic and presentation. This structure helps improve the performance, fosters better documentation, and has multiple built-in functions. This allows easier maintenance on the code. By keeping the data-manipulating logic separate from the bits that handle the display, it becomes much easier to change either the template or the underlying code without touching the other. Using Laravel as a framework means that the code and database are organized and standardized for anyone that knows Laravel or MVC frameworks. So, the code is not a ‘soup’ created by an individual that likes his own methods or designs. If you want an internal team to take over down the road or hire another firm, all you need to do is hire Laravel or php framework experienced developers.
Easy to Learn
Laravel is extremely easy to start and learn. Laravel’s console called Artisan provides many helpers to help you with rapid development. Laravel also provides excellent documentation that provides a step-by-step course on how to use it. Best way to start learning is by watching Laravel courses. They provide quick overviews on how to and where to find information. This easy-to-learn advantage makes it extremely easy to hire and train new developers before or during on-going projects, effectively saving time and money. With PHP being as popular as it is, an easy to use framework takes out any friction in a growing business.
Large and active developer community
Due to its popularity, Laravel, has a very large developer community. PHP is and continuing to be the dominating coding language of the internet. So, naturally, the world is filled with a lot of developers who use PHP and it would make sense that they would use the best PHP framework today. With many developers on hand, bringing new and talented developers to your business is a great benefit.
Security
During app or web development, security is always a huge concern. Luckily, Laravel within its framework handles all of the security. It accepts salted and hashed password, which implies that the password never gets saved as the plain text in the database. Using the Bcrypt hashing algorithm, it generates an encrypted form of the password. Laravel uses prepared SQL statements which makes the occurrence of injection attacks impossible. Along with this, Laravel presents an easy way to avoid user input to prevent user injection of the tag. Several security features are offered by Laravel.
Not all frameworks are the same…
Development of a web application is a mix of common and creative tasks. Good developers like to do all this common work (repeating from project to project) in as little time as possible (without loss of quality) before starting to write custom functions much sooner. Web frameworks are tools that make it easier to solve common tasks quickly with the aim to focus faster on own application logic (creative tasks). Not all frameworks are able to solve each of the described problems equally well. The best web frameworks such as Laravel help developers to do it and this means that Laravel-based development will make software delivery timely and cost-effective. Besides, Laravel is scalable and it is not a problem finding new developers as this framework is very popular.
Don’t underestimate the advantage of the separation of Business Logic from Presentation Code…
This is a key business advantage of MVC frameworks that are well architected. Such separation enables HTML Layout Designers (less costly staff) to change the appearance of a webpage or mobile screen easily without interacting with Developers (more expensive staff). Possible bug fixes and new feature requests or UX changes can be address by developers faster when all programming code of the web application has the appropriate separation. Companies can also create completely different ‘front ends’, e.g. apps or websites that access the same logic and data without rebuilding entire systems. This advantage can be very significant for some brands and products.
We use it too…
FreshinUp plans and design systems to be mobile ready, user friendly, and ready to port to native app releases if the client chooses (at any time). We then develop the front (user side) and back end (administrative side) using php/Laravel framework. Typically this means faster and less-expensive, cloud-based, cross-platform applications for our clients.
