Key Features of Laravel

Laravel is a PHP-based open-source framework used for web application development.  Laravel is gaining attention among developers and businesses worldwide due to its unique and easy-to-manage architecture.

Taylor Otwell is the person who created Laravel. Laravel follows the model-view-controller (MVC) architecture for development. Laravel was created to provide more advanced alternative to the Codeigniter framework. 

Laravel has an endless list of features. But according to me, some of the key features of Laravel are:

Template Engine

Laravel consists of inbuilt lightweight templates known as Blade templates. The Blade Templates help to create unique as well as stunning layouts.

Artisan

Laravel provides an inbuilt Command Line Interface (CLI) known as Artisan. Basically, Laravel CLI is used to perform major monotonous programming tasks, which takes time while implementing them manually. 

Laravel provides an easy-to-manage database system and Artisan plays an important role in managing the database. Artisan is also used to generate basic MVC files using the Command Line Interface(CLI). 

Furthermore, developers can also create their own commands to be executed over the command line.

Eloquent ORM (Object Relational Mapping)

Laravel offers Eloquent ORM which is highly preferred while working with databases. An Object Relational Model is comparatively faster than other alternatives because in ORM PHP syntax is used instead of writing SQL code. Each database table has a corresponding model and it consists of all existing relations and methods for a respective table.

Inbuilt Libraries

Laravel provides a huge set of already installed libraries. Inbuilt libraries make Laravel more popular since other frameworks do not provide such functionalities. Authentication is one of the inbuilt libraries that Laravel provides. Authentication can be implemented in Laravel using CLI and provides all major features that exist in an authentication system, such as validating logged-in users, bcrypt password hashing, password reset, and CSRF(Cross-Site Request Forgery) protection.

Database Migrations & Seeds

Laravel uses database migrations to create and modify database schema instead of using SQL queries. Migration files are created and executed via Artisan commands. Laravel Schema Builder is used to achieve this functionality. Furthermore, to mount our database with default data Laravel provides Seeds to add data in tables using Artisan commands.

Testing

Laravel provides for testing in a very efficient manner. The basic purpose of testing is to ensure that recent changes do not unexpectedly break anything in the application. Laravel provides both Unit and Feature testing. Unit testing is defined as testing the smallest unit of the application such as functions, whereas Feature testing can be described as testing a feature for an application such as login, registration, etc. Laravel test cases are executed over CLI.

Security

While developing a web application the most important concern is security. Laravel framework takes care of security measurements for the application on its own. It uses Bcrypt Password Hashing to generate and implement hashed passwords. Therefore Laravel never updates plain text passwords in the database. Moreover, Laravel uses prepared SQL statements to avoid SQL injections.

Above mentioned features make the Laravel framework highly adaptable and preferred over other frameworks. Laravel provides a secure and highest-performing web app with its strong features.