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Contact us to learn how our Laravel consultants and programmers could help you with Laravel Microservices. Figure. Example of Microservices Architecture. Differences between Laravel and Lumen Lumen microframework is a lightweight version of Laravel full-stack framework. Lumen use the Laravel syntax and components, and can be 'upgrade' easily to Laravel. Lumen is a more specialized (and stripped-down) framework designed for Microservices and API development. So, some of the features in Laravel such as HTTP sessions, cookies, and templating are not needed and Lumen takes them away, keeping what's essential - routing, logging, caching, queues, validation, error handling and a couple of others. As Taylor Otwell, the main creator and maintainer of the Laravel and Lumen frameworks, underlined in his interview: “Lumen opts for maximum speed. The actual Lumen framework repository is probably only a dozen files or so. The rest is made up of the Illuminate components. This allowed me to flesh out the features of the framework very quickly, though it did take me three or four iterations to find a solution that was really, really fast while still providing very powerful features”. Taylor Otwell also talked about one more key difference: «The entire bootstrap process is also located basically in a single file, which is less configurable overall than full-stack Laravel, but for small microservices and APIs that are mainly interested in speed it's a good trade-off». Additionally, Lumen uses a faster router than Laravel (FastRoute instead of Symfony’s) and many features are disabled by default in Lumen in comparison with Laravel, for example, Facades, Dotenv environment files, Eloquent and so on. Microservices need to possess the ability to read and write to a database, must be secured, be built with the so-called message-driven approach, and have the ability to provide reports. Modern microframeworks make these tasks as trivial as possible. Lumen is the perfect solution for building microservices. It utilizes all benefits of Laravel framework including security, easy database configuration (MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, and SQL Server), queue service configuration, integration with reporting tools and so on. Lumen microservices architecture example Let’s imagine a standard web page on an ecommerce website. To pull together the various parts of that website, we might need several microservices. One of them might display the details about the product being offered for sale. Another might show the price and stock level. And we’ll probably be showing shopping cart contents too, which may be another microservice. If the shopping cart service is unavailable, we’re probably in a lot of trouble, but we could still show the web page with the listing. Perhaps we just hide the shopping cart or replace it with an icon saying “Will Be Back Soon!” or replace the part of the UI containing the cart control with a phone number for placing an order. RESTful API Development with Lumen (Laravel) Microframework API is an approach that allows different applications or different parts of a single application to share data among each other by special programming commands. By default, an application has no use for APIs if it is not defined by software requirements. When a customer orders an API creation from us and they want to go with Laravel Development then we usually suggest the use of Lumen. When is it necessary to develop an API for the application and why do we choose Lumen for this? For any API service, speed is very important, because if it is not able to serve a lot of requests per second fast, the business perspectives of using the API will be much reduced. As we considered earlier, API development can be done using fast microframeworks like Lumen, which is one of the fastest PHP micro-frameworks available. Lumen microframework can be used to build an API for a web application to integrate it with a mobile application. Simple example: a mobile bookstore application offers a search feature, where the user can look for books by author name. The mobile application needs to use an API, which should be provided by a bookstore web service, to get data about authors and books. Lumen microframework can be used to build an API for integrating different microservices within a large service/application (core project). For example, a core web application helps to order stuff from local, offline stores/partners. Each of these stores/services come with their own APIs. The right development approach is to create a microservice, which will call the APIs of the partners and provide its own API to transfer data received from partners to the core web application. The most popular open source APIs created using Lumen are located on github.com. Which tool to use – a full-stack framework like Laravel or a microframework like Lumen – depends on software requirements and developer competence/experience. Top-notch developers teach: “Use microframework if you are comfortable with making all of your own architecture decisions and full-stack framework if not”. Since large web application can be built based on microservice architecture approach, this means that projects must not be just micro or small to use the microframework. When it is a good idea to use microservices According to the software requirements, each web project is reduced to one of the following types: Development of an application from scratch; Rebuilding (or refactoring) a legacy application; Adding new functionality to an existing application. ‘Microservices architectural approach can be used in each of these cases. But often it is used for refactoring (rewriting) a legacy application from monolith into microservices.’ Basically, there are 4 main reasons for it: The application is getting so big that developers need a lot of time to understand it, and therefore organizational/project scaling issues are arising; The application consists of different parts with independent and very different update&release frequencies; There is a necessity to dynamically scale specific parts of the system up and down, independently from the other parts; Different parts of the system have specific domain or technical requirements that force developers to use a programming language/framework which is different than the common programming language of the team.  Business perspectives of microservice architecture Protect from failure. In a monolithic service, if the service fails, everything stops working. With a monolithic system, we can run on multiple machines to reduce our chances of failure, but with microservices, we can build systems that can handle the total failure of services. Since services can fail at any time, it's important to be able to detect the issue quickly and, if possible, automatically restore working order. Microservice applications put a lot of emphasis on real-time monitoring, checking both architectural elements (how many requests per second is the database getting) and business-relevant metrics (such as how many orders per minute are received). Semantic monitoring can provide an early warning system of something going wrong that triggers development teams to follow up and investigate. This is one of the main reasons why organizations like Amazon and Netflix use these architectures—to ensure they remove as many impediments to getting software out the door as possible. Scalability. A change made to a small part of the monolithic application (scaling), requires scaling of the entire application rather than parts of it which in turn requires greater resources (hidden costs of building the monolithic application). In contrast, microservices are independently scalable. With microservices, developers can make a change to a single service and deploy it (moving from test server to production server) independently of the rest of the system. Decreasing team size and their productivity. Microservices help developers minimize the number of people working on each codebase to hit the sweet spot of team size and productivity. Project managers can also shift ownership of services between teams to keep people working on one service collocated. When services are isolated from each other,  much less coordination is needed between service owners. The less coordination needed between teams,  the more autonomy those teams have, as they are able to operate and evolve their services more freely. Figure. Microservices Architecture is sometimes the best technological solution for business. Source: martinfowler.com/microservices/#what Examples of projects with microservices architecture We used Laravel microservices to create insurance calculator for Insly Company to speed up the quote calculation for brokers who also use this SaaS system. With microservices, it is easy to test API calls and create documentation for new functionality. Gilt, an online fashion retailer, started in 2007 as a monolithic application, but by 2009 Gilt’s system was unable to cope with the load being placed on it. By splitting out core parts of its system, Gilt was able to better deal with its traffic spikes, and today has over 450 microservices, each running on a separate machine. The Guardian website is another example of an application that was designed and built as a monolith, but has been evolving in a microservice direction. The monolith still is the core of the website, but they prefer to add new features by building microservices that use the monolith's API. This approach is particularly handy for features that are inherently temporary, such as specialized pages to handle a sporting event. Such a part of the website can quickly be put together using rapid development languages, and removed once the event is over. Similar approaches are used at a financial institution where new services are added for a market opportunity and discarded after a few months or even weeks. Other examples include Amazon, Netflix, Google, Ebay, the UK Government Digital Service, realestate.com.au, Soundcloud, Forward, and comparethemarket.com. Google Maps is an example of a cloud based web application that shares its own functionality through APIs for free, but with some limits, after exceeding which this API functionality becomes paid. Some other great companies such as Ebay provide APIs that help entrepreneurs to make money by integrating their web, desktop or mobile applications with the eBay API platform. As ProgrammableWeb editor-in-chief, David Berlind puts in his blog: ‘For those who understand the potential of APIs, there could be millions of dollars to be made, or saved.’  Differences between full-stack and micro web frameworks for building microservices A web framework is a tool for solving common software development problems fast (read as “cost-effectively”). Web frameworks are divided into full-stack frameworks and microframeworks.  Web frameworks “allows developers to save time by re-using generic modules in order to focus on other areas”. As an example, a framework will keep the developer from having to spend 2 or 3 days creating an authentication form (which is not a specific task). The time that is saved can be dedicated to more specific components as well as to the corresponding unit tests; giving the solid, sustainable and high-quality code. Another example: when working in teams, things can get ugly when it comes to choosing options for libraries and tools. Usually, each member of the team will try to push her/his preferred options. Nevertheless, if the team is using a framework, it can simply use the default options and avoid discussions. A full-stack framework is a framework that attempts to provide nearly everything — from web serving to database management right down to HTML generation — that a developer could possibly need to build an application. It likely includes components that may not be needed by the majority of applications, but having them available makes it easier to integrate new features. A microframework is a framework that attempts to provide only the components that are absolutely necessary for a developer to build an application; or it may focus on providing the functionality of one particular area very efficiently. Microframeworks often tend to be better-suited for smaller applications or for applications with specific purposes for which the framework was designed. In the case of web application frameworks, a microframework may be specifically designed for building the so-called APIs for another service or application. Microframeworks often need to be extended with additional components in order to make them provide more functionality. Source: digitalcommons.uri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1632&context=theses A microframework is a collection of bare necessities required to build a web application. Typically, a microframework facilitates receiving an HTTP request, routing the HTTP request to the appropriate controller, dispatching the controller, and returning an HTTP response. Some microframeworks take this a few steps forward and also provide additional tools to manipulate the HTTP response (HTTP caching, status updates, redirects, and so on) as well as a middleware implementation. Many developers are familiar with larger full-stack frameworks like Laravel or Symfony. These excellent frameworks have a larger codebase, more "kitchen-sink" functionality, but also require more time to learn them. For some projects, both Laravel and Symfony are great tools. For other projects that do not require additional features, microframeworks are a more appropriate tool for the job.

Contact us to learn how our Laravel consultants and programmers could help you with Laravel Development. Laravel framework is very popular for custom software development. It is the Most Starred PHP Framework on Github: more than 56 000 developers from all over the world (mostly from the USA) greatly appreciate robust features of this platform. Why is Laravel so popular? It gives the right tools to help build websites and web apps faster, more stable and very easy to maintain. Authentication and Authorization Systems Each owner of the web application needs to ensure that users are who they claim to be and thus prevent unauthorized users from gaining access to secured/paid resources. Laravel benefit #1: Laravel makes implementing authentication very simple. Almost everything is configured out-of-the-box. Laravel also provides a simple way to organize authorization logic and control access to resources. Integration with Mail Services Mail service can be used to send notifications to users’ emails after various events. It’s hard to imagine a modern web application, for example, lacking even a simple email notification to a new user about their successful registration on the website. Laravel benefit #2. Laravel provides a clean, simple API over the popular SwiftMailer library. Laravel also provides drivers for SMTP, Mailgun, Mandrill, SparkPost, Amazon SES, PHP's “mail” function, and “sendmail”, allowing an application to quickly get started sending mail through a local or cloud-based service. In addition to support for sending email, Laravel provides support for sending notifications across a variety of delivery channels, including SMS (via Nexmo) and Slack. Integration with Tools for Making Web Applications Faster It is important not just to create an application but also to create a fast application, which will result in accelerating revenue. Integration with so-called caching backend is often one of the main steps taken to improve a web application performance. Laravel benefit #3. Laravel supports popular cache backends like Memcached and Redis out-of-the-box. By default, Laravel is configured to use the file cache driver, which stores cached objects in the file system. For larger applications, it is better to use an in-memory cache such as Memcached or APC. However, with Laravel it is even possible to configure multiple cache configurations.. Fixing the Most Common Technical Vulnerabilities Security vulnerabilities go hand-in-hand with the development of any web application. American non-profit organization, The OWASP Foundation, describes the most critical web application security vulnerabilities: SQL injection, cross-site request forgery, cross-site scripting, etc. The developer must not forget and be able to fix all of them before delivery. Laravel benefit #4. Laravel helps to secure the web application by protecting it against the most serious security risks: SQL injection, cross-site request forgery, and cross-site scripting. Laravel itself is secure. We can tell you first hand that the codebase is fanatically guarded, and that the code has been vetted by several people. Configuration Error and Exception Handling The way a software application handles errors can have a big impact on user satisfaction and usability of the application. Data-entry forms are one of the most common places where errors are identified and presented after users click a Submit Button. If something does not work because of the user doing something wrong, he/she should be notified about it in the convenient form. If user’s action cannot be completed because the user submitted incorrect data, it should be reported to him/her in an informative error message. Without proper error handling, the user may decide that the problem is in the application (it is out of service) and move away from the application forever. Nobody wants to lose their customers or to disappoint them. Laravel benefit #5. Error and exception handling is already configured for any new Laravel-based project. In addition, Laravel is integrated with the Monolog logging library, which provides support for a variety of powerful log handlers. Automation of Testing Work Without testing and verifying what the developer has created, how can anyone (including the developer) be sure that the software will perform without any crashes, bugs, errors and in accordance with the initial application requirements? Automation testing is less time-consuming and in many cases more exact than manual testing. Laravel benefit #6. Laravel is built with testing in mind. In fact, support for testing with PHPUnit is included out-of-the-box and a phpunit.xml file is already setup for the application. The framework also ships with convenient helper methods allowing for expressive testing of the applications. It provides easy ways for simulating basic behavior of users (making requests to the application and examining the output, for example, clicking links, filling out forms). URL Routing Configuration Users will utilize a web application by clicking or typing links. They will hope to see the desired content, for example, an article, a contact form, a product description etc. If there is no URL routing, the web application will never understand what the user wants to see and may show a blank page or an error page instead. Laravel benefit #7. All Laravel routes are defined in the app/Http/routes.php file, which is automatically loaded by the framework. The most basic Laravel routes simply accept a URI and a Closure, providing a very simple and expressive method of defining routes. Separation of “Business Logic Code” from “Presentation Code” Such separation enables Html Layout Designers (less costly staff) to change the appearance of a web page easily without interacting with Developers (more expensive stuff). Possible bug fixes and feature requests would be done by developers faster (read as “cost-effectively”) if all programming code of the web application has the appropriate separation at the early stage of the development. Laravel benefit #8. Laravel is an MVC framework, so separation is already done.  See the figure: the full MVC request cycle in a Laravel 5 application. Image source: selftaughtcoders.com/from-idea-to-launch/lesson-17/laravel-5-mvc-application-in-10-minutes/ Message Queue System (Delayed Delivery) Configuration It's not just about simple email messages, but about a lot of forms of communication between different parts of the application or between different applications. The more traffic a web application gets, the more requests it must handle per second, the bigger the risk will be that hosting this application will be very expensive (especially, cloud hosting) or that the web server will stop working with data loss. No stakeholder likes to appear in situations such as this. To prevent it, developers may decide to use the message queue system at the start of project development among other techniques for load balancing, increasing application's speed and keeping data integrity. Laravel benefit #9. The Laravel queue service provides a unified API across a variety of different queue backends. Queues allow you to defer the processing of a time-consuming task, such as sending an e-mail, until a later time, which drastically speeds up web requests to your application. Scheduling Tasks Configuration and Management Whether it is necessary to send out emails to the subscribers each morning or automatic cleanup of the database tables at the end of the day (to make the application faster and to reduce the cost of hosting), any web app needs a task scheduling mechanism to take care of the tasks, when it’s time. Laravel benefit #10. In the past, developers have generated a Cron entry for each task they need to schedule. However, this is a headache. Such task schedule is no longer in source control, and developers must SSH into the server to add the Cron entries. The Laravel command scheduler allows for the fluent and expressive defining of command schedule within Laravel itself, and only a single Cron entry is needed on the server. How Fast are Laravel-based Web Applications? Web application should run as quickly as possible. Amazon found that every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. Google found that extra .5 seconds in search page generation time dropped traffic by 20%. Broker can lose $4 million in revenues per millisecond if his electronic trading platform is 5 milliseconds behind the competition! It is important not just to develop web application but to develop fast web application, which will result in accelerating revenue. Is Laravel fast enough to use it for custom software development? As a rule, caching is the way to increase application performance by storing in the filesystem or in memory results of such expensive operations as requests to the database server. The most common way of explaining the power of cache is via analogy. ‘Caching is like storing milk in the home refrigerator, so you don't have to go to the store (or the farm) every time you need it.’ CEO of Brightidea, San Francisco Bay Area, the USA Laravel PHP Framework provides wonderful built-in tool to keep the Laravel applications fast – so called cache drivers. How does caching work in Laravel? After customers enter an URL of your application into browser, the physical server, where your application is hosted, will receive a request, process it (in a lot of cases, by making requests to the database server), and send back a response. A large number of complex requests to the database server is one of the most resource-intensive operations. Imagine that 1,000+ Internet users visit your website simultaneously and make requests to the database server! You should have very expensive equipment to handle them all as fast as possible.  It’s much more efficient to transfer the most requested pages once, cache them and then serve future requests directly from the cache. Laravel supports popular cache backends like Memcached and Redis out of the box. By default, Laravel is configured to use the file cache driver, which stores cached objects in the filesystem. For larger applications, it is better to use an in-memory cache such as Memcached or APC. However, with Laravel it is even possible to configure multiple cache configurations for the same driver. ‘I have moved several slow WordPress sites to Laravel. Speed improvement is about 700%. 10s (WordPress) - 1.5 s. (Laravel).’ Milan Lesichkov How much faster can caching make Laravel applications? The performance can be improved twice just by using cache! Awesome enough, right? Check out also this package  to optimize your site automatically which results on a 35%+ optimization. Avaiable filters: Inlines small external CSS files; Removes unnecessary attributes in HTML tags; Injects tags in the HEAD to enable the browser to do DNS prefetching; Removes unnecessary quotes in HTML tags; Removes unnecessary prefixes from URLs; Removes unnecessary whitespace in HTML; Removes HTML comments. Tips to optimize web application perfomance Besides this, our developers know that there are some other technics to boost speed of the php-based application. Known fact that page loading speed is an essential factor for any site. Users are not willing to wait for long pages response and in the worst cases they can leave your site. Search Engines reduce page rank of your site when the speed is too slow; this results in fewer visitors from Search Engines. And, yes, as the site administrator you’ll feel irritation, if you have to wait a long time while managing your site, knowing that this process can be accelerated. All the ways to speed up your site are divided into two basic methods: website software optimization and server software/hardware optimization. Recently Belitsoft PHP department developed several highly loaded PHP based websites and we want to share some techniques that allowed us to speed up sites, developed using the following languages/technologies/tools: PHP, MySQL Percona Server, JavaScript HTML5, CSS3, Apache, Nginx, FastCGI, APC. Using the outlined methods in this article, you’ll be able to speed up your PHP-based website quickly and effectively regardless of its platform. Tips to optimize web application perfomance SQL requests optimization Long processing of database queries is often the cause of slow pages loading. Often the reason for this is incorrectness of queries writing, lack of competent tables indexing, bulky and too complex requests and etc. At this stage it is necessary to catch all requests that carried out more than 2 seconds and directed to database more often. You can handle with too long requests by using correct index settings in tables and writing less bulky requests with all recommended SQL rules. System caching data received from the database is the most effective way for most repeated queries. It works as follows - if one of the visitors sent the query to database which returns some data then this info will be taken from the cache if the same query will be done even from the other user. Thereby the load on the database is decreasing and the page load time increases. Decreasing image size You can often notice slideshow elements on the main page of websites, where you find 5-7 images, 300KB each. As a result, we got somewhere around 2MB, which are downloaded from the server to user's browser. Also, if the website is a shop and contains more than a thousand of products, and each of these products has 2-3 pictures (200-300Kb) on page, then all of the images need full load time, which ultimately increases pages load time. In this case I propose: As far as possible, keep the pictures in JPG, instead of PNG format. Some would say that quality will be lost, but sometimes it is not even eye noticeable, and with a large number of pictures - that gives the result. With a help of special programs, change image compression degree. Thus reducing the image quality by 10-15% gives a weighty image size reduction and visually you cannot see the difference. Tip: Instead of point 1 and 2 you can check any of your website URLs with Page Speed Tools as it reports how many bytes would be saved by optimizing the page's images. It is also possible to compress images "on fly" when receiving them from server to browser. GZIP allows you to make it easily after site connection and perform this task very efficiently. Caching After these procedures, it is desirable to use one of the >data caching systems. This allows to store the received data from server in browser cache for some time. This method allows not taking data from server after reloaded page and using cached data from your browser. It also reduces servers’ load and reduces page load time. Source code optimization In fact, it is one of the most important methods and maybe one of the most labor-intensive. Initially correctly built system foundation gives reliability, faultiness and speed of operations. Every developer knows about it, but often neglects this approach. The developers should initially use object-oriented programming paradigm to obey Model-View-Controller and etc., since it becomes truisms for most modern web-development software. In this early stage of software architecture any errors would entail substantial labor costs in future. Experts in Belitsoft Company have broad experience in developing fault-tolerant source code, which flexibly scaled and modified for the unique requirements of any customer. At the same time, software speed remains fast and customer retains its ability to improve the system without system redeveloping from scratch. We want to mention fast methods of source code optimization, which gives the results in a short period of time: 1. Asynchronous javascript loading This method is used when you have on page: Yandex and / or Google metrics or similar software that collects all visitor statistics from all of your pages. Online chat that uses JavaScript. Various «share options» (share buttons: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and others) that uses JavaScript. Often, such JavaScript is loaded before the main visual elements on page and main visual elements are not showing till JavaScript finishes its work. Since JavaScript takes some time to load not a significant visual content, it might seem that whole page is loading slowly. In such cases you need to use asynchronous javascript loading: At first, page is loading visual objects (page layouts, styles, text, images), which is about 90-95% of total visual content on page; JavaScript is fully loaded in the "background” only after the first point. As a result, we receive a user-friendly page as almost all content on the page will be shown without delay for the end user. 2. Correction of HTML, CSS, Javascript errors In order to detect such errors use online W3C-Validator, which analyzes any site, indicates such errors and explains what kind of mistake is this and how to fix it. This method allows you quickly remove obvious errors and thus in most cases it helps to speed up the process of page loading. It also helps search engines to be more loyal to your website, which means the increase of site rating. 3. Reduction of page elements If you load a page with a certain category products, then similar products and images will be displayed in this list. For example, you display 20-40 goods on pagination list, which means that the exact numbers of images are loading too. In most cases, page visitor cannot see all of the 20-40 items at the same time. To view them all, he needs to use the mouse scrolling. It follows that the initial loading of 20-40 images takes a lot of time. And the visitor is bored to wait until these 20-40 pictures will be loaded on page. Possible solutions: Load 6-12 elements for each category. In most cases, this is the exact number of elements on a page; Remove the following type of pagination: «>»; Load 6-9 new items as far as you scrolling the mouse; Put a vertical arrow to the lower right corner in order to return to the head of page. As a result, this method allows you to download partly data on page, according to users’ needs, reducing the load on server and free up system resources to use on other tasks. Tips to optimize server software\hardware perfomance NGINX web server installation instead / or in parallel with the Apache web server This gives enormous increase of performance, which helps to reduce the time for inquiry process more effectively. With simultaneous use of Nginx and Apache, it is possible to divide the load between two systems. Percona server installation Percona Server is a replacement for standard MySQL. Percona stands out for improved performance and scalability. Advanced functionality allows you to gather various statistics, analyze the problems and find optimal solutions. Percona is free; it also allows accelerating the inquiry process in database for a short period of time, thereby to reduce page load time. Fastcgi installation Configure this interface on the side of the server increases the speed of the executable scripts. APC installation After installation it allows to cache executable PHP scripts, which also reduces load on web server and decrease page load time. Optimization of system logs There is a history log created on server after all system manipulations and if someone is making changes to the system. This history is accumulated in logs: FTP logs, MySQL logs, web server logs, SMTP server logs and etc. In fact, any software installed on the server can create a list of such logs. But all of these logs are extremely important, as in case of any system failures or unauthorized access by third parties, system administrator will always be able to understand causes and recover system. Logs constantly reduce servers’ disk space that could lead to unpredictable expenses on additional free disk space. Also server creates a special system file (paging file) that is filled during peak hours, when RAM is not enough for server to handle all requests. This system file is always reserve several GB of disk space and can be increased «on fly». So if logs "eat up" the remnants of disk space, the system file cannot increase and as a result the site is very slow, and sometimes it even freezes. There is only one way out except buying a lot of disk space: Set up continued, automatic backup of current log; Backup process should be scheduled on a low load time (usually at night); Periodically move backup of old logs from the current site server to another location to help not to overload disk space; After that, overwrite the old logs with new one on schedule. Tariff plan change and server upgrade If you have used all of the methods above and still want to speed up site response you should update servers’ hardware: Processor power, RAM increase; Placement of web server, server database and file storage on different servers; Master and Slave modes organization on web server side. The first mode takes the main load and sends the rest to the second one; Use "cloud" storage to speed up page load when loading the heavy content (images, video, sounds, etc.) from the closest server. All of these options (or combinations) will also have a positive impact on site responsiveness and will allow to sustain at least ten thousands visitors at the same day. Built With Laravel Both well-established companies and startups are using Laravel Development. The framework is robust and versatile, which is appreciated by business owners on many levels. Take a look at examples of great Laravel-based projects. #1. STARTUPS.CO STARTUPS.CO is a startup launch platform built with Laravel to help emerging companies find customers, press, funding, and mentors. The platform tracks 825,000 startups and provides access to 13+ million registered users. It serves customers in the United States and internationally. Startups.co is based in Powell, Ohio. Fundable.com, a subdivision of  startups.co is also built with Laravel. It is a crowdfunding platform that offers rewards-based and equity-based campaigns for small businesses. Fundable has helped arrange $150 million in funding for startups through its platform. Zirtual.com, another part of startups.co is also built with Laravel. It provides dedicated US-based virtual assistants for busy entrepreneurs, professionals, and small teams to perform in-person tasks; legal, accounting or HR; full-time customer support; team/staff management, etc. #2. Toyotahalloffame.com Fantasy football is an interactive online competition for 30+ million players in the U.S. and Canada. Toyota and Yahoo are bringing the average fantasy footballer a chance to be inducted into a fantasy hall of fame. This Laravel website is set up to nominate hall-of-famers. #3. RV.CAMPINGWORLD.COM RV.CAMPINGWORLD.COM is a Laravel-based web application of the American corporation Camping World, which specializes in selling parts and service for recreational vehicles (RVs) and camping supplies. This Laravel website helps users in selling or buying RVs online and making requests for services (diagnostic, repair, maintenance, warranty, collision, and installation). #4. GLOBALDIETARYDATABASE.ORG GLOBALDIETARYDATABASE.ORG is a data collection Laravel web application created for the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. It has since attracted media attention and was endorsed by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The aim of this project is to collect diet and nutrition data from hundreds of government health ministries, academic institutions, and NGOs around the world. When this data is compared with disease databases, they can establish correlations between diets and health outcomes. This Laravel web app automatically tracks and maintains the status of all data and communications. #5. EXPLOREGEORGIA.ORG EXPLOREGEORGIA.ORG is an official Laravel-based state’s tourism website of the Georgia Department of Economic Development (the United States). This innovative and engaging web app uses practical planning tools to motivate travelers to make a trip to the state. Georgia Explorer Trip Planner offers potential visitors a playful way to explore the entire site and plan their dream vacation or weekend. All aspects of the travel decision-making process for the consumer have been taken into consideration – from inspiration to trip planning to booking to sharing via social media. The site provides greater exposure for the state’s thousands of tourism industry partners. More than 16,000 Georgia restaurants can be searched and filtered based on location, cuisine or type of establishment. The similar affiliate websites are Marketgeorgia.org and Tourgeorgiafilm.com, which also use Laravel framework. #6. CEENTA.COM CEENTA.COM is a complex corporate Laravel-based website of an American Medical Group, Charlotte Eye Ear Nose & Throat Associates (CEENTA) located in North Carolina. CEENTA is the region’s premier provider of the eye, ear, nose, and throat care for adults and pediatric patients for more than 90 years. In addition to otolaryngology and ophthalmology, the group’s complete services include audiology, allergy, clinical research, contact lenses, on-site surgical facilities, facial plastic surgery, sleep medicine and full-service optical shops. #7. INVICTAWATCH.COM INVICTAWATCH.COM is a complex corporate website built with Laravel of an American watch company Invicta Watch Group (previously founded in 1837 in Switzerland). The website has e-commerce features such as online product catalog with images, videos and descriptions. #8. RATEMYAPPRENTICESHIP.CO.UK RATEMYAPPRENTICESHIP.CO.UK is a Laravel-based web application, which is aimed to provide young people in Great Britain with relevant information about Apprenticeships and School Leaver Programmes as well as other relevant opportunities such as Sponsored Degree Programmes, Gap Year Programmes, Traineeships and work experience. An apprenticeship is a real job with a mix of on-the-job and off-the-job training during which a specific set of skills and qualifications is taught that will be useful in future jobs. It usually takes between one and four years and can be done in a variety of industries, including accountancy, finance advice, engineering, retail, law and social care. In addition to training and education, an apprenticeship provides the apprentice with work experience and an income. RateMyApprenticeship.co.uk belongs to the UK Company RMP Enterprise (based in Westminster). #9. FOX47.COM FOX47.COM is an official news website of Fox-affiliated television station WMSN-TV that covers society, sports, weather and traffic for the Wisconsin Capital Region. #10. BONAPPETOUR.COM BONAPPETOUR.COM is a community marketplace (Airbnb-style social restaurant) built with Laravel framework that connects travelers with local home chefs for a unique home-dining experience. On this website, travelers can find dinners available in the cities they are visiting (in over 75 cities around the world). Each dining experience features a menu prepared by the home chef (there are more than 500 verified hosts), a description of the host and reviews by previous guests (if any). Travelers can message the host if they want to. Once both the traveler and the host have confirmed the arrangement, the traveler should make payment via the website.  Bonappetour was founded in 2013 in Singapore. #11. YULAIR.COM YULAIR.COM is probably a website for Canadians to search for the best airfare to/from the country. This multilingual web application is built with Laravel framework. A team of experts scours the web for the cheapest flights leaving from different local airports and posts them on this website. Visitors can then search the site or get email alerts. Yulair averages 100,000 unique monthly visitors and has a social media following of over 80,000. #12. LARACASTS.COM LARACASTS.COM is a well-known e-learning Laravel-based website that specializes in teaching subscribers PHP framework, Laravel, and other related technologies. It updates daily, specifically for working web developers. The majority of beginner-level content is free to everyone. And a monthly $9 charge gives developers access to the entire catalog of videos. Laracasts is based in the USA and has a social media following of over 25,000 on Twitter and 10,000+ on Facebook.

Contact us to learn how our Laravel consultants and programmers could help you with Laravel Development including Wordpress to Laravel Migration or Integration Wordpress Blog with Laravel. When developers propose using a modern MVC framework (such as Laravel) over a CMS (such as WordPress), non-tech stakeholders are sometimes unsure whether it is the right choice. Prebuilt CMS might seem a money/time saver and a more obvious tool to accomplish their business tasks. However, when is it really better to use a CMS rather than a typical modern framework for custom software development? Advantages of Wordpress WordPress, as the most popular CMS, is often a good first choice for the project. Of course, it is not fit for everyone. Generally speaking, WordPress is usually the no.1 choice if: The project falls under the category of content-based portals such as blogs/newspapers.  The market has available WordPress plugins with the necessary quality/security and functionality to suit software requirements. The founder of the startup wants to test the market and to create the first version of the website fast/cheap with a stripped-down functionality. In this case, WordPress can be useful as a prototype and platform for a minimal viable product. Some non-tech managers believe WordPress is better than any frameworks because WordPress as a pre-built CMS has a great admin panel (user-friendly interface), so each non-tech staff member can update the website without developers. The truth is that if it's necessary to have a WordPress-like admin panel, then it will be developed easily with a framework. It is also easy to find a Laravel developer - the market is quite wide. As Jake Goldman, the owner of WordPress-centric digital agency 10up (California), puts in his blog: “Pushing WordPress to a client in the face of clearly better-suited alternative is, from my perspective, tantamount to professional malpractice.” Security vulnerabilities of Wordpress When making a decision on the use of WordPress, security vulnerabilities of the WordPress core and plugins should be considered. Just get a quick overview of the widely known cases: Over 1 million WordPress sites may be affected by a flaw in WP Super Cache plugin 50,000 sites hacked through WordPress plug-in vulnerability Websites running WordPress hacked to display money-making ads for hackers Hackers Grab 800,000 Banking Credentials My client's site was hacked and I do not have a backup of his WP site. He's been calling me for 3 days but could not answer. What can I tell him? Security vulnerabilities of WordPress mean that it is important to constantly update the WordPress core and plugins (which implies hidden costs). Well-developed Laravel-based websites are more secure and do not need constant updates. Laravel uses custom code and has built-in functions for encryption and protecting against common vulnerabilities. Moreover, Laravel is fully compatible with PHP 7. This newest version of the language makes web applications faster and more secure. And it requires fewer servers to handle the same amount of requests per second, which reduces hosting expenses. At the same time, most of the themes and plugins of WordPress are not fully compatible with PHP 7. Moving WordPress website from PHP 5 to PHP 7 can also be a time-consuming endeavor. Limits of Wordpress There are limits of customization that come with any system built with WordPress CMS. If the WordPress-based project grows (more registered users, more operations per second, etc.), at some point there is no choice but to re-create it with a framework (such as Laravel) or to migrate the website to the Laravel framework. We gathered some frequent cases: Gizamo: «Asking a web developer to modify a CMS can significantly increase developmental costs. It may also create complications in core functionalities, such as updating, theming, etc. And, it can require a darn good programmer, depending on the platform (which will further increase the costs)». Developer: «I have been developing with WordPress for a while now. I have been using WordPress outside of its element and been developing web application that aren't necessarily blogs. I loved all the functions they have, and the security it provides.  But I'm starting to work with more complex applications, applications that are starting to not fit in the WordPress model. I need to find a framework that's similar to WordPress in the developmental aspect. I just need a powerful framework that is lightweight and well documented. So I need a framework that can handle user management, template engine, security updates, and has good documentation for development». Ekaitzastiz: «I have done a lot of things with WordPress: custom themes, widgets, plugins... And for news web and blog web portfolio, it was enough. However, Laravel is a framework that can be used to do exactly what you want and how you want; you can do a custom backend, a REST API, a SPA app, an intranet, a CRM... Big effort is needed in WordPress to do big changes like that. WordPress is not as customizable as an app that you build from scratch with a custom design and focusing on your needs. It's not as flexible when changing anything. Moreover, very important, is the weakness of most plugins and widgets in WordPress: they aren't tested with PHPUnit, or aren't build applying TDD». Masiorama: «After months developing and using WordPress-based solutions for my clients I noticed that the start of every single project was very fast (easy to install, lots of materials available for free or cheap) and satisfactory enough, but the hell arrived each time there were some more-than-little modifications (logic and design). Using a framework with a pattern like MVC (I use Yii) may be more difficult at the beginning, but to write, debug, and organize your code is far more fluid and satisfactory, on the long run. Even a module (CMS) can be easily extended or rewritten with lesser effort than packed CMS solutions like WordPress». Steven Richardson: «I just built the whole thing in Laravel, including the blog. I got my app response time down to 35ms with a total page load time of 1.02s from the original 4.3s.  I believe if you can build something that will perform faster, even on a mobile connection over a bloated CMS then build it. Your readers and users will thank you for it». Milan Lesichkov: «I have moved several slow WordPress sites to Laravel. Speed improvement is about 700%. 10s (WordPress) - 1.5 s. (Laravel)». Gravy: «I am moving my website from WordPress to Laravel as the website has moved away from being a blog and requires more enterprise and custom functionality. The website has outgrown WordPress». Raffworks: «I decided to consider moving away from WordPress and into using a lightweight framework for building my sites and web apps. I went for CodeIgniter 2.1.3, but got a surprise insight into Laravel as I was doing so, and have decided to go for that instead». Milan Lesichkov: «My experience starting with WP and moving it later to Laravel was a nightmare. I have moved many web sites away from WordPress to Laravel. The benefits are great security, speed improvements, full flexibility of what can be done, development speed, great model layer for working with databases, and many more. So my advice, stay away from WordPress. It was meant to be a simple blogging engine that is “hacked” to do much more. Everything in WordPress is a “hack” but most of all, the database. The “blog post” is a post, “image” is a post, “page” is a post and what-ever-you-think-of is a post. All additional data is added in metas, which have to be joined multiple times to get related data. Once your database grows even just a little bit, it gets slow as a turtle. Development speed. It takes me 5–10 times less time to do the same features with Laravel than WordPress. Every time you develop for WordPress you have to “hack” something to get it working. With Laravel it’s all modular and reusable. For instance, what if you want to have a blog on your website? Well it took me about 2 days to do a blogging module for Laravel—fully flexible, that can be added anywhere, reused many times after this». Why Laravel Development with a framework is a bit expensive in the first investment and cheaper in the long run compared with WordPress development and customization. Maybe it does make sense to invest in proper custom architecture with Laravel or another suitable framework from the outset? Development of a web application is a mix of common and creative tasks. Good developers like to do all this common work (repeating from project to project) in as little time as possible (without loss of quality) before starting to write custom functions much sooner. Web frameworks are tools that make it easier to solve common tasks quickly with the aim to focus faster on own application logic (creative tasks). Not all frameworks are able to solve each of the described problems equally well. The best web frameworks such as Laravel help developers to do it and this means that Laravel-based development will make software delivery timely and cost-effective. Besides, Laravel is scalable and it is not a problem finding new developers as this framework is very popular.  Tasks that usually take hours and hundreds of lines of code to write, can be done with Laravel framework in a few minutes with pre-built functions. For example, basic authentication (including social login integration), cache (to improve performance), form validation (to ensure that user has provided necessary and properly formatted information), and etc. are already implemented in a new installation of Laravel. Development becomes easier, faster, and efficient! Writing unit tests is usually very time-consuming, however, it’s definitely worth the spent time because software testing provides clients with information about the quality of the product or service. Fortunately, Laravel testing is already integrated into the framework! Laravel community is very friendly and helpful, and documentation is detailed: developer doesn’t need to spend much time researching best practices in developing and maintaining web applications and making decisions on how to implement everything properly. Unlike Symfony or Zend framework, developers can find many code snippets, tutorials, courses about Laravel. With October CMS based on Laravel PHP Framework, the process of building absolutely anything from simple promotional sites to high-powered web applications becomes even easier. October CMS now is a go-to platform for many developers and clients. It has been installed more than 100 thousand times.