What is Laravel?

Laravel is a web application framework with rich, expressive syntax. We accept development must be an enjoyable, creative experience to be really satisfying. Laravel gives the improvement by facilitating common tasks utilized within the larger part of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.

Laravel aims to make the development process a pleasing one for the engineer without sacrificing application functionality. Upbeat developers make the best code. To this end, we’ve endeavored to combine the best of what we have seen in other web systems, including frameworks implemented in other languages, such as Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET MVC, and Sinatra.

There are many reasons to use Laravel to develop your site:

● It can be integrated with a number of popular databases, including MySQL, Oracle, Sybase, Informix, PostgreSQL, and Microsoft SQL Server. In addition, Laravel supports almost every major protocol such as IMAP, POP3, and LDAP.

● The Laravel scripts are executed much faster than other languages like Jakarta Server Pages and ASP.NET Programming language.

● Laravel uses its own memory, so the server workload and loading time are automatically reduced, which results in faster processing speed and good performance. 

● Laravel is available for WINDOWS, LINUX & UNIX, and MAC operating systems.

● A Laravel application developed in one OS can be efficiently executed in other Operating Systems as well. 

● Laravel involves the concept of object-oriented programming, so you can create objects that can interact with other pages on the web.

● Laravel is also compatible with almost all local servers used today, including Apache, IIS, and many others.

How Do You Know Which Laravel Hosting You Need?

With so many hosting options out there, it can be challenging to navigate all the features they offer. Here’s a list of important questions you can ask to evaluate the right Laravel PaaS for yourself:

● Is there a server uptime guarantee?

● Do they have 24*7*365 customer support?

● What add-ons and features do they have?

● What are their technical specifications?

● What are their upgrading or downgrading options?

● Are their control panel and user interface easy to use?

● What kind of customer reviews do they have?

● Do they have a free domain and hosting migration?

● Where are their data centers located?

● Do they offer free SSL certificates?

Hosting providers like Cloudways offer a range of features to suit your specific needs.

How Laravel Changed the Web

In the early days, web applications were created in text editors, using raw HTML to create static web pages. By making use of Laravel, websites become more dynamic, faster to develop, and more responsive. The developers of PHP can deliver premium quality PHP applications. Nowadays, there are also a number of professional website builders available that make the process more simple.

Laravel facilitates web servers to gather form information, send and receive cookies, or generate the dynamic page content. It’s an ‘in the face’ response to all the complexities that developers face before its existence.

Different Versions of Laravel:

Depending on which one you are looking at, each version has bugs, and each version supports different features; some of which may be removed soon. My best suggestion is to always keep up to date, or you’ll fall behind. There are tons of new features in 8 that many people should take advantage of. 

The 5.6 security patch was dropped last year, so applications running on it would be prone to security vulnerabilities. ChangeLogs for previous major versions are also available if you thoroughly search the official site.

Laravel 5

Laravel utilizes Composer to manage its dependencies. So, before using Laravel, you need to make sure you have Composer installed on your machine.

As of PHP 5.5, a few OS distributions may require you to manually install the PHP JSON extension. When utilizing Ubuntu, this could be done by means of a composer.

Laravel 6

Laravel 6, bug fixes were provided for 2 years and security fixes are given for 3; a long time. These releases provide the longest window of back and maintenance. For common releases, bug fixes are provided for 6 months and security fixes are provided for 1 year.

Laravel 7

Laravel 7 was released and includes many new features including Laravel Airlock, better routing speed, custom Eloquent casts, Blade component tags, fluent string operations, a new HTTP client, CORS support, and many more features.

Laravel 7 proceeds the improvements made in Laravel 6.x by presenting Laravel Sanctum, routing speed enhancements, custom Persuasive casts, Blade component tags, familiar string operations, an engineer centered HTTP client, first-party CORS support, improved scoping for route model binding, stub customization, database queue enhancements, different mail drivers, query-time casts, an unused artisan test command, a variety of other bug fixes, and ease of use improvements.

Laravel 8

Laravel 8 is now released and incorporates numerous unused features including Laravel Jetstream, a model directory, model factory classes, migration squashing, rate-limiting improvements, time testing helpers, dynamic blade components, and many more features.

Laravel may be a development framework and, as such, it won’t make your server more secure, just your application. Laravel features allow you to utilize everything safely. All the information is sanitized where required unless you’re using Laravel with raw queries.

Laravel 9

Planned to be released by September 2021, Laravel 9 was pushed to January 2022, making it the primary long-term support (LTS) release to be presented following the 12-month release cycle.

Bottom Line:

PHP is extremely easy to get started with. There’s no messy setting up of compilers. Almost every OS has some ready-made server environment like XAMPP that a new programmer can download and get started with right away. It’s also extremely easy to intertwine HTML and PHP code when you first start.

Laravel is the fastest way to go from idea to web page. It may not be most sustainable in the long term, but it can grow if you plan it outright (proper coding practices, optimizations, database concerns, etc). While experienced devs know this isn’t a great practice, it’s incredibly appealing to newer devs to work with what they know and sprinkles in some Laravel.

PHP is a special-purpose language — it is only useful for web server back end programming — making it perfect for the functional part of websites. Facebook is one of the many popular websites written in PHP dialect.

There’s a lot to love about Laravel. It scores high when it comes to web development due to the availability of frameworks written in it. You will find lots of frameworks that can make your life very easy.

Laravel is free, but you need to have a server to run it. If you don’t have a server, you can rent server space from DigitalOcean or a service provider like Cloudways.