Laravel

Laravel is an open-source framework for the PHP language, created by Taylor Otwell and first released in 2011. Based on the MVC (Model-View-Controller) architectural pattern, it emphasizes clean, expressive syntax and developer productivity, which has made it one of the most popular frameworks for building web applications in the world.

How Laravel works

Laravel organizes an application around the MVC pattern: models represent data, views handle presentation and controllers tie the logic together. The framework ships a complete set of ready-made mechanisms that in plain PHP you would have to write by hand:

• Eloquent ORM — a convenient mapping of database tables to PHP objects;
• routing system — a readable way to define URLs and how they are handled;
• Blade templating engine — composing views from reusable components;
• migrations — version control for the database structure in code;
• queues and scheduled tasks — handling background work such as sending emails.

A rich ecosystem has grown around the framework: Composer for dependency management, and tools such as Horizon (queues), Sanctum and Passport (authentication), or Forge and Vapor for deployment.

Practical application

Laravel is used to build a broad range of applications: CRM and ERP systems, SaaS platforms, online stores, APIs for mobile apps and admin panels. It suits both small projects and large, high-traffic systems. A Laravel application is deployed on a server with PHP-FPM and a MySQL or MariaDB database — full control over the environment comes from a VPS or a managed server, where you can tune the PHP version, caching and queues to the project's needs.