This is an introductory article presenting you with the basics of Laravel. It will be a comprehensive Laravel framework tutorial. Helping you understand its core functionalities, and understand its importance.
Taylor Otwell was the creator of Laravel an MVC-driven PHP framework. The first version of Larave launched back in June 2011. Laravel is one of the most popular PHP frameworks out in the website design and development world. This popularity is a credit to-many Laravel features geared towards developers.
Laravel Framework Tutorial: What is PHP?
PHP or Hypertext Processor is one of the most used and popular scripting languages. This prevalence in the development community is due to its flexibility, easy learning-curve, ease-of-use. No matter the language, coding for long periods of time can become tiresome.
A PHP Framework is built to aid in streamlining the process of web application design and development. By providing developers with a basic structural foundation, a PHP Framework helps in the advance of RAD or Rapid Application Development.
Frameworks can also aid beginners to build more sustainable and stable apps. Frameworks do this by providing a proper core structure.
The Need For Laravel’s Creation
Back in the early 2000s, a majority of PHP-based codes were in the form of ‘scripts’ – cumbersome and procedural to use. These scripts didn’t take long to grow in number and turn into a jumbled-up mess of spaghetti code. Pages had no SoC (Separation of Concern), making applications turn into unmanageable clusters of code.
Laravel was created to address many issues developers had with previous PHP frameworks. Laravel features include; built-in user authorization and authentication, along with support for localizations, modeling, multiple sessions, and views, etc.
Due to its initial complexity in development. Many experienced PHP developers required a beginner’s Laravel Framework tutorial to function.
Laravel Framework Tutorial: How To Install
The Laravel framework uses a composer to manage its dependencies. Thus to use Laravel you have to first download composer.phar. Once you have downloaded the PHAR archive on your system. You can now turn it into a local project directory or move it to usr/local/bin to use it across our system.
If on a Windows system, you can use the Windows Installer to download the composer on your system.
Website Design and Development: Laravel Basics
In this Laravel Framework Tutorial, we will be learning the basic concepts and fundamentals of Laravel:
To understand how Laravel works we will dabble into the core fundamentals of how to make a basic application. Building a basic application can be good practice for newbies looking to become Laravel developers. Due to the basic nature of the task, we have left out many things. Things like; ‘database modeling, authentications, real-world application, migrations, etc’.
We will cover the following components for our hypothetical basic Laravel application:
- Route – A route in the Laravel PHP Framework is a path created for the application to communicate with the outside world. Hence a route also defines the logic behind the interactions, saving, and location of the application.
- Controller – A controller a tool that handles the flow of responses to requests made to the application.
- Template – A template is a quantitative list on display of all previously uploaded files and its sperate from the actual uploads.
- Request – A request is a user query that is then sent to a controller to authenticate data that passes through a given web form.
Our Take
This article should act as an introductory Laravel Framework tutorial. To aid and give you a basic overview of the quintessential PHP framework. What we did in this article was scratch the surface of what Laravel is capable of doing.
Most importantly this article gives you as a business owner a perspective into Laravel and its potential. With Laravel building both beautiful & functional websites and applications are a breeze. But to leverage Laravel tremendous possibilities, businesses need to with experienced and skilled Laravel developers.
