Web developers are always searching for the best PHP frameworks for building next-gen applications. And for many, Laravel is at the top of their list. However, many remarkable frameworks have evolved to compete with Laravel; why choose it? Why is Laravel better than others?

Laravel is a free and open-source PHP web framework initially created by Taylor Otwell and intended to develop web applications following the model–view–controller (MVC) architectural pattern. It also provides an infrastructure to build different types of websites.

In this context, we will reveal why Laravel is still the number one choice for web application development in 2022.

Laravel is a free, open-source PHP framework that provides developers with tools to create web applications. Laravel is considered one of the most popular web frameworks globally and has been widely adopted by many Fortune 500 companies.

Laravel helps developers get started quickly with its built-in tools and scaffolding features. These features include an ORM (database abstraction layer), caching libraries, and an authentication system that can be used out of the box without writing any code.

Laravel also has many other features that make it a great framework for building modern and enterprise-level web applications, such as:

• Database Abstraction Layer (aka Eloquent ORM). Laravel's Database Abstraction Layer provides users with a beautiful, simple ActiveRecord implementation that can be used to work with databases. It makes it very easy to query and save data to your database using PHP syntax, which is known as an active record pattern.
• Routing. Routing in Laravel provides a straightforward way to map URLs to actions in your application. You can also create custom routes and map them to controller actions or even controller classes.
• Templates/Views. Templates are used for displaying content and data from models or collections on your website. This allows you to separate the logic from the presentation layer of your application to more easily maintain different parts of your website separately from each other.
  

Laravel allows you to develop an application faster than other frameworks. It was designed from the ground up to be a modern PHP framework that helps you build better applications faster and easier than ever before.

Since Laravel was developed, it has gained a lot of popularity among developers.
There are many reasons why Laravel has gained so much popularity over other frameworks like Zend, Symfony, or Codeigniter:

• It is open-source, free to use, and extendable.
• It features a basic syntax that makes writing code straightforward.
• It uses MVC architecture which makes development faster and easier.

Laravel allows rapid development because its features make coding easier. For example, Laravel comes with built-in authentication functionality, which saves developers time writing repetitive code. In addition to this, Laravel provides many tools that help developers build their applications faster, such as database migrations; templates; routing; sessions; caching, validation, testing; authentication, etc.

One of the most important features of a PHP framework is creating and using custom application-specific classes. Laravel makes it easy to create new classes, and even better, it makes it easy to extend existing classes.

Laravel is simple to use while strong, providing the tools needed to build massive, sophisticated applications. A superb combination of simplicity and opportunity distinguish Laravel from other frameworks.

Laravel aims to simplify development by simplifying processes like authentication, routing, sessions, queueing, and caching, which is typical in most online projects.

Laravel Homestead is an official Vagrant box that includes everything you need to develop modern PHP 7 applications on your Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux system. The default Laravel 4.2 PHP environment is provided for convenience and compatibility, but the focus is on modern features like composer dependency management and PHP 7.

1. Better authentication and authorization option:

Laravel provides you with an easy way to add authentication to your application. It uses sessions to store user data and information, making it more secure than other frameworks.It has built-in support for user registration, forgotten password recovery, email confirmation, password reset, etc. You can easily customize this functionality by using additional packages such as Socialite, Larashop, etc.

2. MVC Architecture of Laravel Framework

Laravel provides an MVC structure for PHP applications that helps develop complex web applications. It has been developed with modern programming practices in mind, so it can be easily used with other new technologies since its creation.  

The following are the core component of MVC Architecture:

• Models: It represents the application's data layer and provides a data abstraction layer. It has many classes which are used to interact with the database.
• Repositories: These provide an interface to interact with the data source. They are pretty similar to Laravel Eloquent ORM, which we will discuss later in this blog post series.
• Controllers: These are responsible for handling incoming requests from users and taking necessary actions before returning a response to them.
• Views: These are responsible for returning responses to the user after processing all request parameters in controllers and model data received from repositories or database queries executed by them.
  

3. Easier database migrations

Database migrations are one of the most important parts of any web development project. Laravel makes it easier for you to manage your database migrations because it has a built-in tool for managing databases. You can also use this tool for generating schema from an existing database, so you don't have to write all the SQL code yourself.

4. Built-in support for localization:

Laravel comes with built-in support for localization. You don't have to install any external tools or libraries for localization purposes like the Inflector class in Symfony2 or the Translator class in Symfony3.

5. Built-in support for templating:

Laravel uses the Blade template engine, which allows you to write clean templates that are easier to read and maintain throughout the project lifecycle. It also provides some built-in helpers like @foreach loop, which make your code cleaner than other templating engines like Twig.

6. Frontend & Backend Routing

Routing is a crucial component of any web application. The application's routing is the way to map requests to the appropriate controllers and actions.

In Laravel, you can use the built-in routing system, which provides a way to organize your application's routes and handle incoming HTTP requests.

The most common usage for routing is to handle web requests. You can create a route that maps a URI to a controller method. For example, you might have a route that accepts GET requests to /articles/{id} and returns an article with the given ID:

Route::get('/articles/{id}', 'ArticleController@show')

7. Automated and Unit Testing Feature

The Laravel PHP framework comes with powerful automated testing capabilities, allowing you to focus on writing your application's logic instead of spending time on repetitive tests.  

The Laravel testing package is built on the PHPUnit testing framework and provides over a hundred test cases that can be used to assert your application's behavior.

Laravel also provides powerful tools for running automated functional tests against either your local or remote servers. These tests can run parallel to speed up the overall test suite execution time and are always 100% repeatable.

Laravel is an excellent long-term investment. It's a popular framework, and it's been around for a while. The community is large and active, which means that if you need help with anything, plenty of people can help you out.
It's used by many large companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook.

Laravel has also been productized as Lumen (a micro-framework) and Spark (a set of tools). These products give you an easy way to get started with development without worrying about things like configuration and hosting. This makes Laravel an attractive choice for startups where time is at a premium and their limited resources.

Laravel is modern, modular, and well-documented. It can be used to build anything from small to enterprise applications. Here are some of the pros and cons of using laravel.

Pros:

1. Laravel is a general PHP framework among developers because of its features like routing, authorization, authentication, ORM (Eloquent), Scaffolding, etc., which makes it easy for them to develop applications quickly.
2. Laravel has a powerful Blade template engine that allows you to write templates in plain HTML with simple tags for data binding. The Blade templating system will also enable you to write dynamic code inside your templates using "syntax" tags (e.g., @if/@endif).
3. It comes with many built-in functionalities that can be used out of the box without any additional setup required; however, then these functionalities can also be extended or modified as per our requirements easily via the use of Composer packages and custom code written in PHP or JavaScript/jQuery or even CSS if needed!
4. The Laravel community is vast and active, which means plenty of resources are available online, including documentation.
   

Cons:

It has a steep learning curve if you are new to PHP or programming in general.

Laravel is a modern, actively developed, and open-source PHP platform intended to help developers build various websites. Its all-platform framework enables you to create complex web applications that include but are not limited to different business websites, online portals, and web applications, fully-featured CRMs, and many more.

Laravel brings the MVC structure, which makes the development of apps more accessible and faster than ever. The added value of Laravel that makes it stand out from other PHP frameworks is its command-line access provided by Artisan, which features task management and creation, scaffolding, testing, and much more. This makes the Laravel framework a suitable solution for most types of complex projects.