Laravel is an open-source PHP framework, developed by Taylor Otwell. Laravel intended for developing web applications in the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern. It is based on Symfony.
Laravel offers a rich set of functionalities such as a command line interface called artisan, built-in user authentication and authorization, packaging system, task scheduling, testing, etc.
It saves a lot of time if you are planning to develop a website from scratch.
Composer
It uses the composer for the dependency manager. Third party libraries can be easily implemented using the composer. A file composer.json is stored in the source folder to manage the packages or libraries in the web application.
Artisan:
A command line interface artisan includes a set of commands from the Symfony framework resulting in as an add-on feature. The common use of artisan commands is to publish packages, running database migrations, seeding and generating boilerplate for models, controllers, and migrations. One can extend this functionality by creating custom command of their own.
Testing
Laravel provides unit testing feature by default for applications. The integration of the PHP Unit test framework is easy in the application.
Routing
It provides a flexible approach to the user to define routes in web applications. It helps to scale applications and increases its performance.
Templating engine
Laravel comes with the inbuilt template engine known as Blade Template Engine. Blade templating engine combines one or more templates with a data model to produce resulting views, doing that by transpiring the templates into cached PHP code for improved performance.
Blade also consists of control structures such as conditional statements and loops, which are internally mapped to their PHP counterparts.
Task Scheduling (introduced in Laravel 5.0)
The task scheduling is an addition to the Artisan command-line utility that allows programmatic scheduling a task for periodical execution. Internally, scheduler relies on the cron jobs to run a single Artisan job that, in turn, executes the configured tasks.
Events and Broadcasting
Laravel has a concept named broadcasting which is useful in the modern web application to implement real-time data, showing live feeds, etc. Broadcasting allows you to share same event name between your server-side and client-side, so you will able to pull real-time data from the application.
Built-In Authentication and Authorization
Laravel provides an out-of-the-box configuration for the Authentication and Authorization system. That is, in just a few artisans commands your application will be equipped with secure Authentication and Authorization.
Packaging System
A packaging system deals with the multiple support software or libraries that help the web application to automate the process. Laravel uses a composer as a dependency manager, which manages all the information needed to manage packages. Packages are a great way to accelerate development is to provide the functionality we need out of the box. Image, Laravel Debug bar, and Laravel IDE helper are some of the best Laravel packages.
Multiple File System
Laravel also has built-in support for the cloud storage system such as Amazon S3 and Rack space Cloud Storage and of course for local storage. It’s amazingly simple to switch between these storage options as the API remains the same for each system. One can use all three systems in one application to serve files from multiple locations like in a distributed environment.
Eloquent ORM (Object Relational Mapping)
The Eloquent ORM is Laravel’s built-in ORM implementation. Laravel has the best Object-relational Mapper as compared to the other frameworks out there. This Object-relational mapping allows you to interact with your database objects and database relationships using expressive syntax.