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Building Web Applications Using Laravel

webapplication_larvel

Laravel is being used by companies and people for building everything right from hobby projects to fortune 500 companies. It was released in 2011 and since then it has seen enormous growth. It concentrates on the end-user and thus its focus is on clarity, simplicity, and getting the work done. There are many Laravel development company in USA and India that offers you comprehensive Laravel development services in a cost-effective way.

Laravel is described as a framework for “web artisans”. It is a PHP 5.3 framework for web development. Web development was considered a very tedious task and was associated with too many spaghetti codes. It is a clean and classy framework that enables the development of wonderful web applications using simple and expressive syntax. This makes web development a joyful and creative experience removing all the pain associated with it. Enjoy the fresh air!!

laravel-development
laravel-development

According to its author Taylor Otwell, Laravel strives to bring back the joy of programming by making Laravel simple, elegant, and well documented.

The three key features of Laravel are:
1. Simple
2. Elegant
3. Well documented

What makes Laravel different?

Laravel performs a variety of functions that make it different from other packs.

1. Bundles:

Bundles are to Laravel as pear is to PHP. These are add on packages that can be downloaded and plugged into the Laravel installation. It comes with a command-line tool called Artisan, which makes it incredibly easy to install bundles. Additional bundles keep being added to the Laravel Bundle repository.

2. Eloquent ORM

It is the most advanced PHP ActiveRecord implementation level available. It makes working on database simple and easy. Also, It involves defining model relationships to retrieve data from the record based on its relationship with other records.

3. Migrations:

It makes it easy to keep the database schema up-to-date as per the changes of other team members It is of great importance for projects involving multiple developers. In Laravel, migration is built int the framework and can be executed by Artisan command-line utility.

4. Unit-testing:

Unit-testing makes the development of the project more interesting. Laravel’s own beautifully integrates with PHPUnit, relying on its status as one of the industry’s best PHP unit testing frameworks.

5. Redis:

It is a key-value database similar to CouchDB MongoDB. It is used by web applications to store non-relational databases. Redis is an open-source, advanced key-value store. It is often referred to as a data structure server since keys can contain strings, hashes, lists, sets, and sorted sets.

Building a web application from scratch with Laravel

Step1 - Download Laravel and other project files

Before starting coding ensure that you have
*PHP 5.3.x – Laravel makes use of a lot of PHP 5.3-specific features, like closures, late-static binding, and namespaces.
*The FileInfo library – this is enabled by default in PHP 5.3, but on Windows systems, you might need to add the extension in your PHP.ini configuration file.
*Mcrypt library – this is used by Laravel for encryption and hash generation, and typically comes pre-installed with PHP.
After ensuring the right set up downloads Laravel along with all the necessary libraries.We shall require:
*Laravel
*jQuery
*Twitter Bootstrap
Inside the root folder of Laravel, you shall see that there is a public folder, where files meant to be publicly accessed must be stored. Since there are some predefined folders already, such as images, CSS, js, etc, you can place the Twitter Bootstrap and jQuery files in their likely folders.

Step 2: Setup Laravel’s Encryption key, URL’s and Virtual host

Before writing code, a certain encryption key is required for Laravel. We shall need this for the encryption of data that may be required, like cookies. Open the file application/config/application.php and locate the key. Here, we change the default value to blank.

/*

|————————————————————————–

| Application Key

|————————————————————————–

|

| This key is used by the encryption and cookie classes to generate secure

| encrypted strings and hashes. It is extremely important that this key

| remain secret and should not be shared with anyone. Make it about 32

| characters of random gibberish.

|

*/

 

‘key’ => ”,

PHP artisan key: generate
This will automatically generate a 32 character key for encryption in Laravel.
Supporting union types allows a programmer to move more type information from phpdoc into function signatures. It brings with the following advantages:
The next step that we take is to accept petty URLs and work without the pointing of requests to index.php. In the same file for the key, look for –

/*

|————————————————————————–

| Application Index

|————————————————————————–

|

| If you are including the “index.php” in your URLs, you can ignore this.

| However, if you are using mod_rewrite to get cleaner URLs, just set

| this option to an empty string and we’ll take care of the rest.

|

*/

 

‘index’ => ‘index.php’,

Then, set the index to a blank string.
The last requirement is to set up a virtual host for Laravel. This is important for we do not wish to allow access to the Laravel library and application files. As such, all publicly accessible files need to go to the public folder, which is also where our domain should point to.

Step 3: Setting up routing:

All requests to the application in Laravel are mapped to methods and controllers using Routes. These point out to the application where URLs need to go.

Route: any(‘home’, function()

{

    return View::make(‘home.index’);

})

A very important point to take note of here would be that Laravel does not route controller by default, unlike many other PHP frameworks. However, by doing so, it allows us to create simple pages without a controller for them.

Step4: Create your first Laravel controller

The application/controllers folder is home to Controllers in Laravel. The Home Controller accepts requests sent to the root of the Laravel application by default.
Now, to create a controller, the first step is to go to applications/controllers and then create a file there. The file name is usually set to something descriptive, which will also be the name of the controller class. Here, we shall create the controller Login, for login purpose.

class Login_Controller extends Base_Controller

{    

    public function actionindex()

    {

        //we shall carry out the login mechanism 

        echo ‘Testing’; //echo test is to test this controller 

    }

}

laravel_ine3
You shall see the “Testing” message that we had placed in the controller. Also, since we have already set to enable routes to the controller in the routes.php file, this will work without the need for any additional work.

Step 5: Create your first Laravel view with the blade templating engine

There are two ways to generate a view for an application developed in Laravel. One is the PHP-based Views, which uses PHP as the language for templates. Another is the Blade-based Views. These make use of Laravel’s built-in template engine.
The Blade Templating Engine makes use of customized tags and methods that permit a better separation of application code and the presentation logic. Also, for simplicity, we shall make use of the Blade Templating Engine. All of the view files are required to make use of the .blade.php extension, which tells Laravel to use that particular engine for a view file.

Conclusion

Raindrops Infotech is very skilled Laravel Development Company based in India. We deliver high quality and cost-effective Laravel development services. We are specialists in emerging custom Laravel applications based on client necessities. Raindrops Infotech known to deliver complete Laravel solutions for all businesses as a package that will permit you to take a lead against your business’s rivals.

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    Author Details

    Bharat Koriya

    CEO and Founder of the firm

    Mr. Bharat Koriya is the founder and CEO of Raindrops Infotech. He is a very disciplined, soft spoken and enthusiastic person. Being the founder of the company, he takes care of business development activities and maintains relations with clients.

    His charismatic and result driven approach has benefited the company to grow and achieve this height where the company stands right now. His vision, long term planning and sharp knowledge on latest technologies made this organization so successful and profitable in such a short period of time. Bharat ensures that the company gets up-to-date & latest knowledge on different technologies and trends in this competitive market. His problem solving skills and co- ordination abilities makes him favorable among clients and team members.

    View all posts Bharat Koriya

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