Laravel, What???

Ok, so what about Laravel? Who is Laravel? 😄

Laravel is a PHP programming framework just like the popular RoR framework written in Ruby programming language.

It has taken the PHP community by storm and it is because of it's cool developer friendly syntax and is up to date with the latest PHP version release. Let me list down what I love about Laravel.

• It has Fluent syntax
• and Eloquent ORM
• Based on latest PHP version release and component based (upcoming Laravel4)
• Community driven and with cool core developer leads

Fluent syntax ​

Laravel has a fluent query builder for building SQL queries and working with the database. Don't worry about SQL injection because it is protected upon and uses prepared statements. Query a table as easy with this syntax:

$query = DB::table('users');

Here were using table method inside the DB class of Laravel. With this you can now retrieve, insert, update, or delete records from 'users' table.

For further reading read here

Eloquent ORM ​

Laravel has the most advance PHP ORM(Object Relational Mapper) exists. All you need to do is to define a model for the table.

class User extends Eloquent {}

Without defining anything inside the class, Eloquent assumes that:

• the table has a primary key named id
• table name is the plural form of the model name

Now to find a record by its id:

$user = User::find(1);

Getting excited! there's more here for further reading.

Latest PHP and Component Based ​

PHP has a great dramatic improvement since the release of PHP5 that's why Laravel was born.

The upcoming release of Laravel4 will now be component based and will now utilize the tool Composer as it's dependency manager.

Community driven and with cool core dev. leads ​

Laravel was created first by Taylor Otwell and now has some added cool members namely Dayle Rees, Eric Barnes, Ian Landsman, Jason Lewis and Shawn McCool.

And many other contributors..