What is Laravel?

by Taras Kim - December 07, 2018

For every PHP Developer Laravel is not something new, and for the whole web development community as well. This article is for those who still haven't heard about it or just begin study Web Development.

So what is Laravel? Laravel is a PHP framework that simplifies many things in PHP language and in Web Development. You can create from email newsletters to push notifications, from huge admin panels with databases to SAAS applications, and all this with a lot of opportunities for new developers, it's beautiful and simple syntax won't be a problem for you. I tell you this with complete confidence only because for me, it was the first real development work. I was building a simple website for my needs with HTML, CSS, Bootstrap and I came to the need of contact form. I've heard about PHP and dealt with it briefly when the developer who built my last website used this programming language. So yeah, to tell you the truth, I even didn't know that time that I need to use PHP to send data from contact form to my email. So, I was looking for PHP code to help me with this damned contact form and found it, and everything was working good enough, but also, I opened to my self a lot of interesting stuff about web development such as Mysql database and all its functions, different frameworks and finally Laravel. So, I decided, it will be cool to have an Admin Panel to store data of those who use my contact form in the database and display it. My Laravel journey begins...

What is CRUD?

CRUD is one of the first things I've learned about Laravel. When I came to understanding what it is and how it is powerful I decided to become a developer. Really, all the opportunities I saw with it was just WOW for me. Of course, it was just the beginning. CRUD is Create, Read, Update and Delete. You can implement this system of different functions to deal with any object. You can Create it, Show this object, Update and Delete it.

Laravel Controllers

Laravel Controllers handle functions such as CRUD for example. To create an empty controller you need to type: php artisan make:controller TestController, for a CRUD controller type: php artisan make:controller TestController --resource into the console. With CRUD controller command Laravel creates index (display all your objects), create (display create page), update (function to add data from create page to the database), show (display single object), edit (display edit page), update (function to update data from database of the object) and destroy functions.

Databases and Migrations

For every Web applications, you have to create a database with all tables and rows with data in it. With Laravel is simple as much as you can imagine. Use: php artisan make:migration CreateTestsTable and table created! Then you have to add any fields you want (id and timestamps created on default) and type: php artisan migrate .Your table in Database created! Database information such as Host, Username, and password enters in .env file.

 

Eloquent: Relationships

It's another beautiful thing about Laravel. if you never heard about databases and relations between tables it will be difficult for you to understand, but if you did, then you will be amused about how easy it is to build relations in Laravel.

Laravel divides them into One to One, One to Many, Many to Many and Has Many Through

Laravel Notifications

Is a powerful tool, that helps you create email, push, database, and even slack notifications. Anything you do with your object, you can notify user or users about it. Simply type: php artisan make:notification Test and your notification will be created. There are a few more things you have to enter in Controller and in Notifications, but it is really simple to learn.

There are a lot more in Laravel: routing, sessions, validation, jobs, scheduling, hashing, broadcasting, API requests and more.

We here at WellKnown Agency build any type and difficulty applications with Laravel, and so far we haven't encountered such a problem that Laravel couldn't solve.