Introduction to Laravel Framework

This book is about Laravel, a web application development framework that saves you time and effort and makes web development a joy. Laravel has shaken up the PHP community in a big way - especially when you consider that version 1.0 of Laravel was only a couple of years ago. It has been generating a lot of buzz with the promise of making web applications fast and simple to create. Using Laravel, you can build and maintain high-quality web applications with minimal fuss.

Certain parts of a web application development process can be a repetitive, boring task. Laravel lets you focus on the fun stuff - the crux of your web app - while easing the pain of the repetitive bits. In doing so, it provides high-level abstractions of common web development patterns, convenient shortcuts for frequent programming tasks, and clear conventions for how to solve problems.

What Is a Web Framework?

Laravel is a prominent member of a new generation of web frameworks - but what does that term mean, precisely?

Basically, a web framework makes it easier for you to develop your application. Most sites have a common set of functionality (like handling sessions, data validation, etc) and a framework is something that prevents you from re-writing this each time you create a website.

Let’s dive in with a quick example that demonstrates the difference between the previous approach and a web framework’s approach.