Laravel framework is very popular for custom software development. It is the Most Starred PHP Framework on Github: more than 35 000 developers from all over the world (mostly from the USA) greatly appreciate robust features of this platform. Based on data of the BuiltWith, Laravel’s popular website verticals include Business, Entertainment, Media, News, Shopping, Technology, Vehicles. Why is Laravel so popular?

Building Authentication and Authorization Systems

Each owner of the web application needs to ensure that users are who they claim to be and thus prevent unauthorized users from gaining access to secured/paid resources.

Laravel benefit #1: Laravel makes implementing authentication very simple. Almost everything is configured out-of-the-box. Laravel also provides a simple way to organize authorization logic and control access to resources.

Integration with Mail Services

Mail service can be used to send notifications to users’ emails after various events. It’s hard to imagine a modern web application, for example, lacking even a simple email notification to a new user about their successful registration on the website.

Laravel benefit #2: Laravel provides a clean, simple API over the popular SwiftMailer library. Laravel also provides drivers for SMTP, Mailgun, Mandrill, SparkPost, Amazon SES, PHP’s “mail” function, and “sendmail”, allowing an application to quickly get started sending mail through a local or cloud-based service. In addition to support for sending email, Laravel provides support for sending notifications across a variety of delivery channels, including SMS (via Nexmo) and Slack.

Integration with Tools for Making Web Applications Faster

It is important not just to create an application but also to create a fast application, which will result in accelerating revenue. Integration with the so-called caching backend is often one of the main steps taken to improve a web application performance.

Laravel benefit #3: Laravel supports popular cache backends like Memcached and Redis out-of-the-box. By default, Laravel is configured to use the file cache driver, which stores cached objects in the file system. For larger applications, it is better to use an in-memory cache such as Memcached or APC. However, with Laravel it is even possible to configure multiple cache configurations.

Fixing the Most Common Technical Vulnerabilities

Security vulnerabilities go hand-in-hand with the development of any web application. American non-profit organization, The OWASP Foundation, describes the most critical web application security vulnerabilities: SQL injection, cross-site request forgery, cross-site scripting, etc. The developer must not forget and be able to fix all of them before delivery.

Laravel benefit #4: Laravel helps to secure the web application by protecting it against the most serious security risks: SQL injection, cross-site request forgery, and cross-site scripting. Laravel itself is secure. We can tell you first hand that the codebase is fanatically guarded, and that the code has been vetted by several people.

Configuration Error and Exception Handling

The way a software application handles errors can have a big impact on user satisfaction and usability of the application. Data-entry forms are one of the most common places where errors are identified and presented after users click a Submit Button. If something does not work because of the user doing something wrong, he/she should be notified about it in a convenient form. If the user’s action cannot be completed because of the user-submitted incorrect data, it should be reported to him/her in an informative error message. Without proper error handling, the user may decide that the problem is in the application (it is out of service) and move away from the application forever. Nobody wants to lose their customers or to disappoint them.

Laravel benefit #5: Error and exception handling is already configured for any new Laravel-based project. In addition, Laravel is integrated with the Monolog logging library, which provides support for a variety of powerful log handlers.

Automation of Testing Work

Without testing and verifying what the developer has created, how can anyone (including the developer) be sure that the software will perform without any crashes, bugs, errors and in accordance with the initial application requirements? Automation testing is less time-consuming and in many cases more exact than manual testing.

Laravel benefit #6: Laravel is built with testing in mind. In fact, support for testing with PHPUnit is included out-of-the-box and a phpunit.xml file is already setup for the application. The framework also ships with convenient helper methods allowing for expressive testing of the applications. It provides easy ways for simulating the basic behavior of users (making requests to the application and examining the output, for example, clicking links, filling out forms).

URL Routing Configuration

Users will utilize a web application by clicking or typing links. They will hope to see the desired content, for example, an article, a contact form, product description, etc. If there is no URL routing, the web application will never understand what the user wants to see and may show a blank page or an error page instead.

Laravel benefit #7: All Laravel routes are defined in the app/Http/routes.php file, which is automatically loaded by the framework. The most basic Laravel routes simply accept a URI and a Closure, providing a very simple and expressive method of defining routes.

Separation of “Business Logic Code” from “Presentation Code”

Such separation enables Html Layout Designers (less costly staff) to change the appearance of a web page easily without interacting with Developers (more expensive stuff). Possible bug fixes and feature requests would be done by developers faster (read as “cost-effectively”) if all programming code of the web application has the appropriate separation at the early stage of the development.

Laravel benefit #8: Laravel is an MVC framework, so separation is already done. See the figure: the full MVC request cycle in a Laravel 5 application.

Message Queue System (Delayed Delivery) Configuration

It’s not just about simple email messages, but about a lot of forms of communication between different parts of the application or between different applications. The more traffic a web application gets, the more requests it must handle per second, the bigger the risk will be that hosting this application will be very expensive (especially, cloud hosting) or that the webserver will stop working with data loss.

No stakeholder likes to appear in situations such as this. To prevent it, developers may decide to use the message queue system at the start of project development among other techniques for load balancing, increasing application speed and keeping data integrity.

Laravel benefit #9: The Laravel queue service provides a unified API across a variety of different queue backends. Queues allow you to defer the processing of a time-consuming task, such as sending an e-mail, until a later time, which drastically speeds up web requests to your application.

Scheduling Tasks Configuration and Management

Whether it is necessary to send out emails to the subscribers each morning or automatic cleanup of the database tables at the end of the day (to make the application faster and to reduce the cost of hosting), any web app needs a task scheduling mechanism to take care of the tasks, when it’s time.

Laravel benefit #10: In the past, developers have generated a Cron entry for each task they need to schedule. However, this is a headache. Such a task schedule is no longer in source control, and developers must SSH into the server to add the Cron entries. The Laravel command scheduler allows for the fluent and expressive defining of command schedule within Laravel itself, and only a single Cron entry is needed on the server.

Conclusion

Taking a look at some trends allows us to instantly grasp just how quickly things are evolving.

Right now is the perfect time to start developing applications using Laravel. The ecosystem is still dynamic and ever-growing, yet it is mature enough to handle any potential use case. The fact that so many businesses and developers are switching to Laravel every day speaks for itself.