Laravel Tutorials Online

Laravel is a PHP MVC framework. A framework is a collection of integrated libraries that work together to achieve a common goal. A framework forms the foundation on which programmers develop applications on. MVC stands for Model-View-Control. It is a design pattern that separates the data, business logic and presentation. Models deal with business logic and data, Views are responsible for presentation while the Controllers glue the Models and Views together.

The latest version of Laravel as of this writing is version 6. These tutorial series assume you are new to Laravel but familiar with PHP programming in general. For experienced developers, these tutorial series will help refresh your mind on first principles. Codeigniter Tutorials Online

Does it matter if Laravel is the most popular framework according to the SitePoint survey?

Yes, it does matter. From a career perspective, the logical implication of this is that there are more Laravel developer jobs compared to other frameworks. This doesn't mean you should discard other frameworks. It means learning Laravel MVC framework gives you more opportunities to find jobs/ personal projects to work on.

Features of Laravel MVC framework that make it superb!

The following are some of the features that make Laravel MVC framework very popular among developers.

Built on already time-tested components

Supports Rapid Application Developing (RAD) -- the artisan command line utility can be used to create boiler plate code for controllers and models. The command line utility can also be used to perform other tasks such as running unit tests, migrations etc.

Uses namespaces unlike other frameworks such as CodeIgniter.

Blade template -- this is a built-in template engine

Built in features for common web application tasks such as authentication, routing, database managing, sending emails etc.

Class auto loading -- this means you do not have to manually load the classes

RESTful controllers -- this allows you to take advantage of HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE etc.

Unit Testing -- built in unit testing features that can be run from the artisan command line.

Eloquent ORM -- Eloquent is an Object Relational Mapper framework that implements PHP Active Record.

Excellent developer community -- Laravel has good documentation and free tutorials on the internet that all come in handy when learning Laravel. StackOverflow also has a good number of answered questions for Laravel. This means you can easily find solutions to most of the challenges that you will face when developing applications.

How Laravel works

Laravel is a PHP MVC framework. A framework is a collection of libraries that perform specific tasks and work together to accomplish a common goal. MVC stands for Model-View-Controller. It is a design pattern that allows developers to separate business logic (Model) from presentation (View) glued together by the controller. Instead of us writing PHP code to coordinate all of these activities, Laravel has that functionality baked in out of the box. In addition to that, it has libraries (also know as packages) that provide database support, formatting responses sent back to the user, parsing input from the users and so many things. Laravel Tutorials Online

In a nutshell, Laravel works by providing a singe entry into the application via index.php file and then using the defined routes direct the request to the relevant controller. The controller in turn communicates with the model if necessary, then loads the view and sends back the results to the user. If its an Application Programming Interface (API) then the output is usually via JSON format. Other formats such as XML are supported as well using the relevant packages.