What Is Laravel Used for – Most Common Applications

A well-chosen tech stack ensures that your application will become powerful and productive software. There are many languages and frameworks to choose from and each works best for its own type of project.

If you’re considering creating a web application, whether it’s a simple one-page website or an entire full-fledged social network, then Laravel is a viable option for you. Many web developers include Laravel in their tech stacks as it allows them to build robust and effective back-ends for their web solutions.

In this article, we’ll look into why to use the Laravel framework, what web developers can build with Laravel, and when to choose Laravel for your software development project.

What is Laravel?

Laravel is a back-end PHP-based and open-source framework used for building a wide range of custom web applications. It’s an entirely server-side framework that manages data with the help of Model-View-Controller (MVC) design which breaks an application back-end architecture into logical parts.

The framework assumes most of the monotonous work like templating HTML, building authentication, routing, and other activities. This way, it alleviates and accelerates the web development process many times without compromising the Laravel applications’ quality.

What Is Laravel Used For?

There are over 7,000 companies that use Laravel for their web applications and over 170,000 sites run on this framework. The most renowned companies using Laravel services for building their web applications are 9GAG, Pfizer, BBC, Freedom Financial Network, Bank of Texas, GitLab, Wattpad, PayZip, ScreenCloud, and many others.

Businesses that use Laravel for their web applications come from various industries such as  IT, finance, traveling, entertainment, retail, and others. With this multipurpose back-end framework they can build:

• static and dynamic web pages;
• single page applications (SPAs) and multi-page applications (MPAs);
• e-Commerce web sites;
• enterprise-level applications;
• portal web apps, like forums, job portals, news, and others;
• content management systems;
• social networking sites, and others.

Why Laravel Is so Popular

Laravel has been popular among web developers for more than 10 years and it remains one of the most preferred server-side frameworks on PHP. According to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 51.4% of respondents prefer to use Laravel for building their web applications. At the same time, JetBrains claims that Laravel is ranked among the three most popular PHP frameworks with half of PHP developers using it.

What attracts PHP developers in Laravel so much? Let’s have a closer look at its outstanding features.03.01.2024

MVC Architecture

Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern offers fundamental and clear rules on how to build effective web applications. The architectural pattern brings order into an unstructured code, organizing it into a well-structured architecture. This facilitates the creation of small and large web applications, making it convenient and super-fast.

Besides that, MVC groups a web application’s files in logical directories, making it much easier for web developers to find when they work on large projects.

Blade Template Engine

Laravel’s Blade template engine allows web developers to work with textual data in web applications. For this, it handles many operations like connecting data models, processing the application’s code in the source templates, directing the output to a certain text file or stream.

The Blade template helps web developers to quickly process the data with its layouts without any impact on the web application’s performance or speed.

Artisan CLI

Laravel’s Artisan command-line interface (CLI) facilitates web application development, making it simpler and easier. With this tool, web developers can quickly migrate data, manage databases, create the basic code, controllers, models, and other parts of the built application.

Above all, Artisan assumes all the repetitive coding activities, freeing web developers from monotonous manual work. With Laravel’s CLI, web developers can also create MVC files and issue their own commands, adjusting the web development process to their needs.

Eloquent ORM

Eloquent ORM alleviates web developers’ work with databases. It helps to establish and maintain simple interaction between a web application’s architecture and its databases. For this, the ORM uses an expressive PHP syntax instead of complex SQL code, saving web developers much time.

Unit Testing With PHPUnit

Laravel provides web developers with PHPUnit – a testing framework for executing unit tests. PHPUnit includes the two main testing directories – Feature and Unit. With Unit tests, PHPUnit performs tests on small code chunks, whereas Feature tests handle longer codebases that can include several objects.

PHPUnit ensures that Laravel-based web applications are well-tested and work properly. With PHPUnit web developers significantly minimize the number of bugs in the built app, saving time on searching and fixing them.

Top Applications Built With Laravel by SCAND

There is a wide range of Laravel-based examples you can find online. Though, we would like to represent the top 5 Laravel applications built by SCAND’s web developers.

• Procurement management system. The system represents a multifunctional application developed by the SCAND team. The application handles an impressive number of tasks from customer and supplier tracking to managing logistics, and report generation. This enterprise-level solution required a robust framework that could connect to multiple databases, process and manage internal documentation, and easily scale with the customers’ needs. That’s why for this demanding task, the web development team chose Laravel.
• Healthcare SaaS solution for transferring lab tests. This complex enterprise-level solution involved the development of mobile native iOS and Android apps and a web panel for administration. The SCAND team had to connect several applications into a coherent and smoothly performing ecosystem. To build the client-side architecture of their web panel, the team included the Laravel framework in their tech stack. As a result, doctors and clinics could order medical test analyses from labs straight from their smart gadgets.
• Automated legal contract generation. This solution required generating legal contracts based on user responses with simple editing and customization functionalities. The SCAND team used the Laravel framework to perform serious processing work in the app and create the contracts that would fit the client’s needs.
• Digital signage software for advertising. The SCAND team had to develop software that could place adverts on various screens like billboards, digital TVs, payment terminals, and others. For this, the team used their own MVC framework based on PHP and Laravel which represented a lightweight PHP-MVC solution. This allowed building a system with server-side data processing. At the same time, the system could operate without an internet connection by using the previously downloaded files from the server.

Bottom Line on Laravel

Laravel is a powerful framework that allows building web applications of any complexity and purpose from simple one-page websites to enterprise-level solutions. The framework has a set of outstanding tools that simplifies and automates the majority of web development tasks, saving web developers’ time and effort.

If you’re looking to create a stable and effective web application for your business, then a team of Laravel developers is what you need. Using Laravel, web developers can build outstanding and engaging web applications for your business in the shortest time and at minimum cost.