Benefits of Laravel Web Development to Grow Your Business

Why Should You Read This?

If you’re someone who is looking to grow their business or establish a significant online foothold, then this blog is a 7 minute must read.

What is Laravel

Laravel’s official website has a tagline which reads, “Laravel – The PHP Framework for Web Artisans” and as dramatic as that sounds, it’s quite right. Laravel is a user-facing PHP web development framework, and most importantly an open-source (read FREE) framework. It licensed under the terms of the MIT License. Laravel is based on Symfony, which allows developers to create stunning web applications, with minimum lines of code and maximum code reusability.

Fun fact – Laravel’s command-line interface is also called Artisan.

First and foremost, let us understand what exactly is a framework and why do we need it.

What is a Framework and Why should you use it?

From a layman point of view, the term framework itself is pretty self-explanatory. A frame is nothing but the skeleton or a structure upon which more critical stuff built. It sets the foundation for something to be made. A web framework is just that, but for the code. It’s a combination of libraries and reusable components that can perform specific tasks and can be used to build a finished product – say a website. It makes the life of a coder much simpler with out-of-the-box features and functionalities. In other words, it helps you build software applications in a robust and rapid development cycle. It more often than not has a huge community built around it that help you troubleshoot issues and maintain security standards for your web app.

Why choose a PHP web framework

It’s one thing choosing a web framework, and then specifically a PHP framework. Before accepting Laravel as the PHP web framework of your choice, first, let us understand why should you go for a PHP web framework itself. There are a few important reasons:

• First and foremost, PHP frameworks enable rapid development and have a lesser learning curve. 
• They’re syntactically designed to reduce the lines of code and come with out of the box CRUD functionalities.
• Web frameworks come with nifty security features like CSRF token provide default security regarding form validation. It saves a lot of a developer’s time by not having to worry about building such security measures by themselves.
• Based on the MVC architecture, it allows the app to be very modular and robust at the same time. It is the crucial factor for quick-fire web app development.
• It is much easier to scale PHP web frameworks, one of the reasons being its modularity.
• PHP frameworks very strongly abide by the don’t repeat yourself (DRY) principle to make sure that the least lines of code will have the maximum effect on the entire application.

What is Symfony

Symfony is a modern enterprise-grade web application framework. What this typically means is that it gives you the fundamental building blocks to build your custom solution that best fits your business needs. Simply put, it’s the Lego blocks to create your dream solution. 

The stand-out factor for Symfony is its two key elements which are:

• components
• bundles

Components are prebuilt features that cut down on time taken to develop generic tasks and let coders focus more on the client-facing, business-driven features of their web application. There is a total of 30 components that Symfony provides to assist the development lifecycle. The primary point of focus here is that Symfony components are independent modules and can use in other frameworks such as Laravel.

Also, Artisan, Laravel’s command-line interface, introduced in Laravel 3, was later upgraded to an architecture which would be capable of housing components from frameworks such as Symfony. It also led us to the introduction of Laravel 4, which displayed such capabilities.

Bundles, on the other hand, are akin to the plugins that we so commonly use in other technologies. It is a collection of files for developing any feature. This feature could be anything, an image drag-n-drop builder, an e-commerce cart on a website, an order tracking system, and so on. 

There are quite a few benefits in Laravel 4 and further releases, in correlation to it based on Symfony. Some of these benefits are:

• Superior Documentation
• Simple to test your code and debug
• One of the most active Communities online
• Long Term Support
• Reliability 
• Product of SensioLabs

Laravel – the best PHP framework in 2018

According to Google Trends, Laravel is the most searched PHP Web framework in 2018. Have a look at the following image from Google Trends, showcasing the superiority of Laravel amongst other PHP frameworks such as CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Zend, and Symfony:

Business facing benefits of Laravel 

Let’s talk shop! How will Laravel help you achieve effective, punch-the-air-with-your-fists kind of results that take your business to the next level? Let’s have a look at what makes Laravel so good for modern-day companies.

Dependable

Businesses always look to expand with time, both vertically and horizontally. It is essential then that the technology that they depend on allows them the same flexibility. Laravel is built with this in mind and is a highly modular and adaptable framework. More so, it’s incredibly customizable and can bend as per the customer’s changing needs and demands.

Timeliness – Rapid Development and Deployment

Since Laravel has a lesser learning curve as well as shorter development lifecycle, it results in having a product which is built fast, tested fast and goes live quickly. In business, time is of the essence and your idea could be unique right now, but won’t stay unique if you don’t act on it and get a product out in the market. Developers make use of the feature-rich libraries that Laravel provides and can build custom functionalities in a much shorter span of time than they would on other PHP frameworks.

Higher ROI 

It makes sense. Less time to build, faster deployment, less risk involved, less investment and highly adaptable as per the changing landscape of your business all points to one thing – higher Return On Investment. Sometimes your idea might seem too right on paper, but the finished product is not up to the mark. Maybe because it wasn’t executed as planned and has li but the audience for it is not there. With results that can be obtained quicker, you can quit while you’re ahead without wasting too much time and resources on it.

MVC

Laravel based on the Model View Controller architecture, and it is a strong reason in 2018 to opt for this. MVC architecture gives you the brains and the muscle power to make you the boss of your code. In other words, it’s flexible enough to adapt to your changing business needs and can fit custom features and functionalities in a jiffy. MVC Makes it easier for developers to develop the product and hence makes it easier to debug, deploy, change and adapt as per the requirements.

Artisan

Laravel’s CLI (command-line interface) is a big plus. It is responsible for automating many of the mundane tasks that a developer would otherwise need to perform, again saving a lot on time and effort required.

Resourcefulness with Libraries

Laravel comes with a prebuilt set of library functions which could be used straight out of the box. It saves a lot of development time. Features such as user verification, form validation, password encryption and more can be done with these tools. Laravel is pro authentication and authorization systems and provides most of these functionalities itself.

Secure

As your business grows in popularity and web traffic, it will bring in the cybersecurity threats along with it. You need to be ready for it from the initial stages of inception. Laravel provides a high level of security against threats such as SQL injection, cross-site forgery and more. Laravel web development companies in India or across the globe cherish the Secureness of Laravel.

Load balancing

Laravel comes with message and request handling queue management system which come in handy when your site starts attracting more traffic. It offers scalability and load balancing to keep your website up and running.

Open-mindedness or Laravel

Laravel is very flexible and accommodating to integration with third-party tools. Firstly, integrating with Symfony has its benefits. Secondly, performance enhancement tools such as Redis enable cache management for faster load times of your website. In turn, results in happier clients.

Final Verdict

We would give you some unsolicited advice since you’ve managed to get to the end of the blog.

There are a few questions that you need to ask before choosing a PHP framework. Take your time, put in the time and efforts to conduct the research and only then decide upon the best way forward for your portfolio or business or could be a hobby project. 

You should always ask this:

1. A framework could be providing an ocean of features and functionalities. But are you able to align some of those to meet your business objective? Make sure of that.
2. How well is the framework documented and what kind of a learning curve can you expect from this? Do you have the resources needed to invest in this?
3. Can you trust a lesser experienced professional or would you instead go with an expert? How does this impact budgets?
4. As your business demands grow and your venture expands with time, will the app be scalable to support this?
5. Is the framework still being developed or it’s stopped, and only a few support wings are available?
6. Is there long-term support (LTS) for the framework?

What kind of a community does the framework have built around it? Apart from that, what kind of forums can you expect from it?

Surprisingly enough, but Laravel checks all these boxes and answers all these questions pretty well. It’s got great documentation, not a steep learning curve and is having great support worldwide with huge community support at Laravel.io. It’s completely open source so no necessary budget worries there. It’s MVC framework means it has a very business-oriented approach and can scale as per your growing demands.

There has been a rapid rise within the Indian sub-continent when it comes to Laravel Web Development. There are many startups, established businesses or hobbyists looking for Laravel developers. 

To give you a glimpse of what you can achieve with Laravel take a look at this collection of the top Laravel websites at awards.