What is the Laravel?
Wikipedia tells us that Laravel is a completely free-to-use framework developed by a guy named Taylor Otwell. The framework relies on the MVC principles and architecture.
Because the creator of Symfony made the framework parts independent from each other in version 2, you can easily take them apart and combine them to make anything you want.
Let’s First Talk About the Advantages
Keeping up with time
Laravel framework has gathered an active community around itself, thanks to which it is constantly updated and uses the latest PHP features as they are released.
Documentation is everything
Understandable but extensive and detailed documentation is one of the main ” features ” of the framework. In addition to ease of use, this quality also affects the popularity, helping to develop a community, attract new developers, and make outsourcing Laravel development a lot easier. After all, a good developer always appreciates the thorough documentation that Laravel delivers with each new version.
Integration with Email Services
Email is a critical element of web development. Applications need to be able to work with email, and the more “friends” among email services and drivers, the better. Laravel works with a lot of drivers, such as Mailgun, Mandrill, and SES, with SMTP protocol, support mail, and send email functions and allows you to easily customize API for working with mail. It doesn’t matter if you send mails through a cloud service or a local one, everything is provided and tested.
Caching
Not only the database is important for web development, but also for temporary storage such as caching. Solutions such as Redis and Memcached have been included out of the box.
Artisan
Programmers don’t like routine, but they do love the console. And Artisan embodies those two things. With Artisan, you can easily create classes, models, listeners, work with the database, and more. Things that usually take time can now be done with a few keystrokes.
Packages and Resource Availability
Working with packages and versioning has not been neglected either. This includes support for npm, bower, PEAR, and Composer. The latter solves the dependency problem and is one of the most popular and reliable package managers for PHP.
Speed of Development
Thanks to the many libraries, out-of-the-box solutions, and support, the development cycle of a product is noticeably faster. But that’s not all: thanks to the large community and active support, any new bugs or problems are solved incredibly fast.
Routing
An incredibly important feature of Laravel. With routing, you can create named routes, links to them, and work with redirects. Forget about manual routing, make routes dynamically, and make your life easier.
Active Record
Laravel can work with the database by classical SQL queries, but there is another way. Eloquent allows you to work with databases through a system of models, where each model corresponds to a table. Making queries through Eloquent is safer, easier, and faster.
The Disadvantages of Laravel
Composer
Although we added this to the list of advantages, for some developers it may seem to be a disadvantage. It’s younger than its predecessors like Ruby Gems and npm, not everyone knows how to use it, and some might find it difficult to use.
Versioning
Switching from one version of Laravel to a newer one isn’t always easy. You need to keep track of all the changes and adapt your code to all the new features and changes. This can be time-consuming or error-prone if you update in a hurry.
Updates
There are not only problems with Laravel versioning, but with updating the language version too. While this is a common problem for all PHP frameworks (and other languages), we couldn’t let it go unnoticed.
Development Speed
When comparing the development speed of the Laravel framework with many PHP-based CMSs, the former will definitely lose out. However, the scope of Laravel-based software products is much wider comparing Laravel development speed with other frameworks, we won’t see any problems.
Share Your Views: