Architecture of Laravel Applications

At the base of any application are the data models that describe the business rules of your application. Each piece of data is represented by using a database table. Laravel provides a few technologies to simplify access to databases.

Laravel connects the application data models and database tables by turning table rows from the database into PHP objects that can be easily manipulated. It also enables you to enforce business rules, describe relationships between the different data models in your application and so on. For example, a person’s family relationships can be described using Laravel’s Eloquent OR/M as follows:

class Person extends Eloquent
{
    public function mother()
    {
        return $this->belongsTo('Mother');
    }

    public function father()
    {
        return $this->belongsTo('Father');
    }

    public function spouse()
    {
        return $this->hasOne('Spouse');
    }

    public function sisters()
    {
        return $this->hasMany('Sister');
    }

    public function brothers()
    {
        return $this->hasMany('Brother');
    }
}