Laravel Starter - PHP User Group (Myanmar)

Top 5 features you need to know about
Laravel Starter
As you start to use Laravel, you will realize that it provides a wide variety of functionality. We've
taken the time to describe the five most vital components that we haven't covered in the Quick
start section. Gaining mastery over these five components gives you the power to make amazing
web applications with Laravel.
1 – Eloquent relationships
Eloquent is Laravel's native ActiveRecord implementation. It is built upon Laravel's Fluent
Query Builder. Due to the way in which Eloquent operates with Fluent, complex queries and
relationships are easy to describe and understand.
ActiveRecord is a design pattern that describes an object-oriented way of interacting with your
database. For example, your database's users table contains rows and each of these rows
represents a single user of your site. Your User model is a class that extends the Eloquent Model
class. When you query a record from your database, an instantiation of your User model class is
created and populated with the information from the database.
A distinct advantage of ActiveRecord is that your data and the business logic that is related to
the data are housed within the same object. For example, it's typical to store the user's password
in your model as a hash, to prevent it from being stored as plaintext. It's also typical to store the
method, which creates this password hash within your User class.
Another powerful aspect of the ActiveRecord pattern is the ability to define relationships
between models. Imagine that you're building a blog site and your users are authors who must
be able to post their writings. Using an ActiveRecord implementation, you are able to define
the parameters of the relationship. The task of maintaining this relationship is then simplified
dramatically. Simple code is the easy code to change. Difficult to understand code is the easy
code to break.
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