Laravel is an open-source PHP framework designed for developing web applications.

What is Laravel?

Laravel is an open-source PHP web development framework used to create advanced web applications. It contains many modules that PHP developers might need to build robust websites and applications. Laravel allows for following the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture in the development process. Its easy-to-understand structure and built-in modules enable developers to create web applications more easily and quickly. Thanks to its open-source nature, Laravel has a large community of users and is widely used.

What Are the Advantages of Laravel?

Laravel is one of the most popular frameworks for PHP development, offering many advantages to developers.

Ease of Use

Laravel simplifies PHP development processes with its straightforward structure. It includes built-in modules for common features like authentication and authorization, eliminating the need to write these components from scratch in every project. This speeds up the development process.

Open Source

One of the reasons Laravel is so widely used is because it is open-source. The community support for Laravel is strong, and a wealth of resources has been developed around it. If you encounter a problem, you can often find a solution with a quick search or ask for help from the developer community.

Scalability

The use of the MVC model in Laravel development allows for scalable applications. This makes it easy to scale up applications as needed to meet growing demands.

ORM Support:

Laravel includes an ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) tool called Eloquent, allowing developers to work with databases in PHP without manually writing SQL queries.

Laravel and MVC

When developing with Laravel, the MVC (Model-View-Controller) approach is followed. This approach separates code into three parts: model, view, and controller. This division makes the development and maintenance process easier and provides scalability to the resulting software.

The History and Development of Laravel

Laravel was developed by Taylor Otwell as an alternative to another popular PHP web framework at the time, CodeIgniter. The main reason for developing Laravel was that CodeIgniter lacked built-in features like authentication and authorization.

The first beta version of Laravel was released in June 2011, and its stable version, Laravel 1, was launched in the same month. Laravel 1 included features like authentication, session management, and localization, but it did not fully support the MVC architecture.

In September 2011, Laravel 2 introduced MVC and added the Blade templating engine. With Laravel 3, released in 2012, the command-line interface (CLI) Artisan was introduced. The following year, Laravel 4's major change was its ability to work with the Composer package manager.

Laravel has released new versions regularly, with the latest version, Laravel 11, launched on March 12, 2024. This version requires a minimum PHP version of 8.2.