The Laravel framework

Even though Symfony and Zend Framework have been the big players for quite a long time, during this last couple of years, a third framework came into play that has grown in popularity so much that nowadays it is the favorite framework among developers. Simplicity, elegant code, and high speed of development are the trump cards of this "framework for artisans". In this section, you will have a glance at what Laravel can do, taking the first steps to create a very simple application.

Installation

Laravel comes with a set of command-line tools that will make your life easier. Because of this, it is recommended to install it globally instead of per project—that is, to have Laravel as another program in your environment. You can still do this with Composer by running the following command:

$ composer global require "laravel/installer"

This command should download the Laravel installer to ~/.composer/vendor. In order to be able to use the executable from the command line, you...