Thursday 30 October 2014

Laravel taking the PHP community by storm - Few reasons

PHP web development
Laravel is the new PHP framework on the block that is hailed as ‘frameworks for the artisans.’ It has emerged as a fresh gust of wind for the developers who want to enjoy their creative work. It is a classy and clean framework that liberates the PHP developers from the complex spaghetti codes. Yet Laravel helps to come up with impressive applications by utilizing expressive as well as lucid syntax. Although there are experts who opine that all the frameworks are equal and choosing one is merely a personal preference. But when it comes to Laravel the primary reason for its popularity lies in the fact that it enjoys support from a huge community of developers.

Developers generally opt for an open source mainly because there is an active and vibrant community that keeps coming up with popular ideas. This, in turn, helps in creating a rich ecosystem of code snippets, modules, etc. Such an ecosystem will always beat a database created by a certain company. The richness of the database depends on the size of the community. Thankfully, Laravel has a huge community that keeps on growing with each passing day. In this regard, it is reminiscent of Ruby on Rails that had emerged a few years back.

There are various reasons why this framework is preferred by the developers. Let’s begin with its migrations. For creating a database an application needs a quite simple schema with a 5 columned table. The table is required to store title, description, ID, timestamps, etc when the task is created and later updated. To meet this end, there is a feature known as the migrations in Laravel. These are in the form of files which can be used to update the database. Every time they are executed, the schema will alter in a manner that it becomes easy for the developers to update it.

Another reason why it is slowly capturing the PHP market is because it is easy to learn. The learning curve helps you to pick up the technicalities quickly and creating RESTful objects, web interfaces and MVC blocks are no trouble at all. In addition, it uses Composer, Eloquent (as the database abstraction model), Blade (templating standard), Artisan and automatic code generation tool. There are several developers who are unfamiliar with these tools. Thus, it might take a little bit of time to get accustomed to framework. However, once one gets the hang of things, building custom web applications become quite fast. Even a large one can be developed within a short span of time.

Laravel is hugely dependant on the various external packages for its functionality. Composer comes across the dependency manager here. You may as is why should this be important? Well, the composer makes it simple for the beginners to set up the project. There is no need to download zip files online or opt for cloning from github. All that a developer is required to do is click on the run and the entire copy of Laravel will be at your behest. On the other hand, the Artisan is a powerful tool. With this it expands and now the developers can use it to run various kinds of tasks. If you simply type ‘php artisan’ on your terminal window, it will open up multiple options.

There seems to be a perfect balance between usability and flexibility for creating anything that can be implemented online and yet save the long coding hours. However, saving time is not the only criterion that defines a good framework. What makes Laravel stand out is its performance. Of course, it feels all good when you do not have to spend huge hours building a web app. But once you are successful your app must be capable to handle all the hits it receives on being popular. In this regard it is important that your framework provides the necessary support. In fact, this is how a good and poor framework is judged. There are many who are reluctant to invest in testing tools. Under such circumstances, one can opt for finding the reports on a framework’s scalability and performance that are published on the web. You will find that Laravel has garnered good reviews for itself. In fact, it has emerged as a better option when compared to Zend or Yii. Generally frameworks perform faster when they are limited. But in this regard also Laravel scores better than Cake PHP and Zend.

It is due to these vast opportunities that Laravel is becoming a preferable choice for the developers. You can hire developers from PHP development company who can help you build web apps within allocated budgets and time schedules.

We provide PHP application development services. If you would like to hire PHP programmers for your web development needs, please contact us Mindfire Solutions.

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