Laravel
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Developer(s) | Taylor Otwell |
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Initial release | June 2011[1] |
Stable release | 5.6.20[2]
/ May 2, 2018 |
Repository | |
Written in | PHP 7 |
Operating system | Cross-platform |
Type | Web framework |
License | MIT License |
Website | laravel |
Laravel is a free, open-source[3] PHP web framework, created by Taylor Otwell and intended for the development of web applications following the model–view–controller (MVC) architectural pattern and based on Symfony. Some of the features of Laravel are a modular packaging system with a dedicated dependency manager, different ways for accessing relational databases, utilities that aid in application deployment and maintenance, and its orientation toward syntactic sugar.[4][5]: 2, 5–9 [6][7]
The source code of Laravel is hosted on GitHub and licensed under the terms of MIT License.[8]
History
Taylor Otwell created Laravel as an attempt to provide a more advanced alternative to the CodeIgniter framework, which did not provide certain features such as built-in support for user authentication and authorization. Laravel's first beta release was made available on June 9, 2011, followed by the Laravel 1 release later in the same month. Laravel 1 included built-in support for authentication, localisation, models, views, sessions, routing and other mechanisms, but lacked support for controllers that prevented it from being a true MVC framework.[1]
Laravel 2 was released in September 2011, bringing various improvements from the author and community. Major new features included the support for controllers, which made Laravel 2 a fully MVC-compliant framework, built-in support for the inversion of control (IoC) principle, and a templating system called Blade. As a downside, support for third-party packages was removed in Laravel 2.[1]
Laravel 3 was released in February 2012 with a set of new features including the command-line interface (CLI) named Artisan, built-in support for more database management systems, database migrations as a form of version control for database layouts, support for handling events, and a packaging system called Bundles. An increase of Laravel's userbase and popularity lined up with the release of Laravel 3.[1]
Laravel 4, codenamed Illuminate, was released in May 2013. It was made as a complete rewrite of the Laravel framework, migrating its layout into a set of separate packages distributed through Composer, which serves as an application-level package manager. Such a layout improved the extensibility of Laravel 4, which was paired with its official regular release schedule spanning six months between minor point releases. Other new features in the Laravel 4 release include database seeding for the initial population of databases, support for message queues, built-in support for sending different types of email, and support for delayed deletion of database records called soft deletion.[1][9]: 18–19
Laravel 5 was released in February 2015 as a result of internal changes that ended up in renumbering the then-future Laravel 4.3 release. New features in the Laravel 5 release include support for scheduling periodically executed tasks through a package called Scheduler, an abstraction layer called Flysystem that allows remote storage to be used in the same way as local file systems, improved handling of package assets through Elixir, and simplified externally handled authentication through the optional Socialite package. Laravel 5 also introduced a new internal directory tree structure for developed applications.[5]: 13–14 [10]
In March 2015, a SitePoint survey listed Laravel as the most popular PHP framework.[11]
Laravel 5.1, released in June 2015, is the first release of Laravel to receive long-term support (LTS), with planned availability of bug fixes for two years and security patches for three years. LTS releases of Laravel are planned to be released every two years.[12]
Laravel 5.3, released in August 23, 2016. The new features in 5.3 are focused on improving developer speed by adding additional out of the box improvements for common tasks.[13] [14]
Laravel 5.4, released in January 24, 2017. This release has many new features, like Laravel Dusk, Laravel Mix, Blade Components and Slots, Markdown Emails, Automatic Facades, Route Improvements, Higher Order Messaging for Collections, and many others.[15]
Laravel 5.5, released in August 30, 2017.
Laravel 5.6, released in February 7, 2018.
Release history
For LTS releases, such as Laravel 5.1, bug fixes are provided for 2 years and security fixes are provided for 3 years. These releases provide the longest window of support and maintenance. For general releases, bug fixes are provided for 6 months and security fixes are provided for 1 year.[16]
Version | Release date | PHP version | Notes |
---|---|---|---|
1.0 | June 2011 | NA | |
2.0 | September 2011 | NA | |
3.0 | February 22, 2012 | NA | |
3.1 | March 27, 2012 | NA | |
3.2 | May 22, 2012 | NA | |
4.0 | May 28, 2013 | ≥ 5.3.0 | NA |
4.1 | December 12, 2013 | ≥ 5.3.0 | NA |
4.2 | June 1, 2014 | ≥ 5.4.0 | NA |
5.0 | February 4, 2015 | ≥ 5.4.0 | NA |
5.1 LTS | June 9, 2015 | ≥ 5.5.9 | NA |
5.2 | December 21, 2015 | ≥ 5.5.9 | NA |
5.3 | August 23, 2016 | ≥ 5.6.4 | NA |
5.4 | January 24, 2017 | ≥ 5.6.4 | NA |
5.5 LTS | August 30, 2017 | ≥ 7.0.0 | NA |
5.6 | February 7, 2018 | ≥ 7.1.3 | NA |
Legend: | Old version, not maintained | Older version, still maintained | Current stable version | Latest preview version | Future release |
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Source: GitHub[17]
Features
The following features serve as Laravel's key design points (where not specifically noted, descriptions refer to the features of Laravel 3):[4][5]: 5–9 [6][7][18]
- Bundles provide a modular packaging system since the release of Laravel 3, with bundled features already available for easy addition to applications. Furthermore, Laravel 4 uses Composer as a dependency manager to add framework-agnostic and Laravel-specific PHP packages available from the Packagist repository.[19]
- Eloquent ORM (object-relational mapping) is an advanced PHP implementation of the active record pattern, providing at the same time internal methods for enforcing constraints on the relationships between database objects. Following the active record pattern, Eloquent ORM presents database tables as classes, with their object instances tied to single table rows.[20][21]
- Query builder, available since Laravel 3, provides a more direct database access alternative to the Eloquent ORM. Instead of requiring SQL queries to be written directly, Laravel's query builder provides a set of classes and methods capable of building queries programmatically. It also allows selectable caching of the results of executed queries.[22]
- Application logic is an integral part of developed applications, implemented either by using controllers or as part of the route declarations. The syntax used to define application logic is similar to the one used by Sinatra framework.
- Reverse routing defines a relationship between the links and routes, making it possible for later changes to routes to be automatically propagated into relevant links. When the links are created by using names of existing routes, the appropriate uniform resource identifiers (URIs) are automatically created by Laravel.
- Restful controllers provide an optional way for separating the logic behind serving HTTP GET and POST requests.
- Class auto loading provides automated loading of PHP classes without the need for manual maintenance of inclusion paths. On-demand loading prevents inclusion of unnecessary components, so only the actually used components are loaded.
- View composers serve as customizable logical code units that can be executed when a view is loaded.
- Blade templating engine combines one or more templates with a data model to produce resulting views, doing that by transpiling the templates into cached PHP code for improved performance. Blade also provides a set of its own control structures such as conditional statements and loops, which are internally mapped to their PHP counterparts. Furthermore, Laravel services may be called from Blade templates, and the templating engine itself can be extended with custom directives.[23][24]
- IoC containers make it possible for new objects to be generated by following the inversion of control (IoC) principle, in which the framework calls into the application- or task-specific code, with optional instantiating and referencing of new objects as singletons.
- Migrations provide a version control system for database schemas, making it possible to associate changes in the application's codebase and required changes in the database layout. As a result, this feature simplifies the deployment and updating of Laravel-based applications.[25]
- Database seeding provides a way to populate database tables with selected default data that can be used for application testing or be performed as part of the initial application setup.[25]
- Unit testing is provided as an integral part of Laravel,[9]: 61–62 which itself contains unit tests that detect and prevent regressions in the framework. Unit tests can be run through the provided artisan command-line utility.
- Automatic pagination simplifies the task of implementing pagination, replacing the usual manual implementation approaches with automated methods integrated into Laravel.
- Form request is a feature of Laravel 5 that serves as the base for form input validation by internally binding event listeners, resulting in automated invoking of the form validation methods and generation of the actual form.[26]
- Homestead - a Vagrant virtual machine that provides Laravel developers with all the tools necessary to develop Laravel straight out of the box, including, Ubuntu, Gulp , Bower and other development tools that are useful in developing full scale web applications.[27]
Featured packages
Ready-to-use bundles provided by Laravel through Composer and Packagist include the following:[28]
- Cashier, introduced in Laravel 4.2, provides an interface for managing subscription billing services provided by Stripe, such as handling coupons and generating invoices.
- SSH, introduced in Laravel 4.1, allows programmatic execution of CLI commands on remote servers using the Secure Shell (SSH) as an encrypted network protocol.
- Scheduler, introduced in Laravel 5.0, is an addition to the Artisan command-line utility that allows programmatic scheduling of periodically executed tasks. Internally, Scheduler relies on the cron daemon to run a single Artisan job that, in turn, executes the configured tasks.
- Flysystem, introduced in Laravel 5.0, is a file system abstraction layer that allows local file systems and cloud-based storage services provided by Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloud to be used transparently and in the same way.
- Socialite, introduced in Laravel 5.0 as an optional package, provides simplified mechanisms for authentication with different OAuth providers, including Facebook, Twitter, Google, GitHub and Bitbucket.[5]: 13
Artisan CLI
Laravel's command-line interface (CLI), called Artisan, was initially introduced in Laravel 3 with a limited set of capabilities. Laravel's later migration to a Composer-based architecture allowed Artisan to incorporate different components from the Symfony framework, resulting in the availability of additional Artisan features in Laravel 4.[9]: 73–83 [29]
The features of Artisan are mapped to different subcommands of the Artisan command-line utility, providing functionality that aids in managing and building Laravel-based applications. Common uses of Artisan include managing database migrations and seeding, publishing package assets, and generating boilerplate code for new controllers and migrations; the latter frees the developer from creating proper code skeletons. The functionality and capabilities of Artisan can also be expanded by implementing new custom commands, which, for example, may be used to automate application-specific recurring tasks.[9]: 73–83 [29]
Conferences
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/64/Taylor_Otwell_at_Laracon_DC_2013_-_2.jpg/220px-Taylor_Otwell_at_Laracon_DC_2013_-_2.jpg)
Laracon is the official Laravel conference centered around the Laravel framework, covering its development, uses, and related general software development topics. Laracon has taken place in the United States, Europe and online in the past.[30][31] Typically, the conference happens in the United States and Europe every year. 2017 was the first year a Laracon was held as an online event only. Each year the conference has a different variety of sponsors and organizers, but Laravel, Laravel News and UserScape are usually the primary organizers.
See also
- October, a content management system built upon Laravel
- Comparison of web frameworks
- Comparison of web template engines
Notes
References
- ^ a b c d e Maks Surguy (July 27, 2013). "History of Laravel PHP framework, Eloquence emerging". maxoffsky.com. Retrieved May 10, 2015.
- ^ "laravel/framework: Release v5.6.20". github.com. May 2, 2018. Retrieved May 4, 2018.
- ^ "The real-time community site Voten goes open-source".
- ^ a b Daniel Gafitescu (June 6, 2013). "Goodbye CodeIgniter, Hello Laravel". sitepoint.com. Retrieved December 21, 2013.
- ^ a b c d Martin Bean (April 2015). Laravel 5 Essentials. Packt. ISBN 978-1785283017. Retrieved September 2, 2015.
{{cite book}}
:|website=
ignored (help) - ^ a b "Laravel Documentation (versions 3.0–3.2.14)". three.laravel.com. Retrieved August 30, 2014.
- ^ a b "Laravel Documentation (version 4.2)". laravel.com. Retrieved August 30, 2014.
- ^ "laravel/laravel: laravel/readme.md at master". github.com. April 22, 2015. Retrieved May 10, 2015.
- ^ a b c d Raphaël Saunier (January 2014). Getting Started with Laravel 4. Packt. ISBN 978-1783287031. Retrieved September 2, 2015.
{{cite book}}
:|website=
ignored (help) - ^ Eric Barnes (January 30, 2015). "Laravel 5". laravel-news.com. Retrieved May 10, 2015.
- ^ Bruno Skvorc (March 28, 2015). "Best PHP Framework for 2015 – SitePoint Survey Results". sitepoint.com. Retrieved June 14, 2015.
- ^ Eric L. Barnes (June 9, 2015). "Laravel 5.1 is released". laravel-news.com. Retrieved June 14, 2015.
- ^ Eric L. Barnes (August 23, 2016). "Laravel 5.3 is now released". laravel-news.com. Retrieved August 23, 2016.
- ^ David oscar (August 23, 2016). "What's new in laravel 5.3". digitalsoft.in. Retrieved August 23, 2016.
- ^ "Laravel 5.4 Is Now Released". Laravel News. January 24, 2017. Retrieved February 21, 2017.
- ^ "Laravel Documentation: Releases". Laravel. Retrieved February 26, 2017.
- ^ "Github: Laravel". Laravel. Retrieved May 4, 2018.
- ^ Jeffrey Way (November 28, 2012). "Why Laravel is Taking the PHP Community by Storm". code.tutsplus.com. Retrieved May 9, 2015.
- ^ "Laravel documentation (version 4.2): Package development". laravel.com. Retrieved August 30, 2014.
- ^ "Eloquent ORM in Laravel: What and Why!". enukesoftware.com. Retrieved December 19, 2014.
- ^ "Develop Faster with the Laravel PHP Framework". developer.com. Retrieved April 17, 2015.
- ^ "Laravel documentation (version 4.0): Query builder". laravel.com. Retrieved April 27, 2015.
- ^ "Laravel documentation (version 5.1): Blade Templates". laravel.com. Retrieved June 10, 2015.
- ^ Dayle Rees (2014). "Laravel Blade engine". daylerees.com. Retrieved June 10, 2015.
- ^ a b "Laravel documentation (version 5.0): Migrations and seeding". laravel.com. Retrieved April 27, 2015.
- ^ Manmeet Anand. "Creating a Contact Form in Laravel 5 Using the Form Request Feature!". tisindia.com. Retrieved March 2, 2015.
- ^ "Laravel Homestead - Laravel the PHP Framework for Web artisans". Retrieved October 30, 2016.
- ^ "Laravel documentation (version 5.3): Release notes". laravel.com. Retrieved August 29, 2015.
- ^ a b Jason Lewis (February 28, 2013). "Your One-Stop Guide to Laravel Commands". code.tutsplus.com. Retrieved May 9, 2015.
- ^ "Laracon Online | The official worldwide Laravel online conference". laracon.net. Retrieved March 24, 2017.
- ^ "Search Results". laravel-news.com. Retrieved March 24, 2017.
Further reading
- Laravel Design Patterns and Best Practices, Packt, ISBN 978-1783287987, July 2014, by Arda Kılıçdağı and H. İbrahim Yilmaz
External links
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/4a/Commons-logo.svg/30px-Commons-logo.svg.png)