Laravel PHP Developer Interview Preparation Guide

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Laravel is a free, open-source PHP web framework, created by Taylor Otwell and intended for the development of web applications following the model–view–controller (MVC) architectural pattern.

Lumen is a new project from Laravel creator Taylor Otwell. It's a "micro-framework", meaning it's a smaller, faster, leaner version of a full web application framework. It competes other popular micro-frameworks, Slim and Silex.

Middleware provide a convenient mechanism for filtering HTTP requests entering your application. For example, Laravel includes a middleware that verifies the user of your application is authenticated. If the user is not authenticated, the middleware will redirect the user to the login screen. However, if the user is authenticated, the middleware will allow the request to proceed further into the application.
Of course, additional middleware can be written to perform a variety of tasks besides authentication. A CORS middleware might be responsible for adding the proper headers to all responses leaving your application. A logging middleware might log all incoming requests to your application.
There are several middleware included in the Laravel framework, including middleware for authentication and CSRF protection. All of these middleware are located in the app/Http/Middleware directory.

DB::update('update users set city_id = 10 where id = ?', [1015]);

Laravel:
☛ Laravel is a framework with expressive, elegant syntax
☛ Development is enjoyable, creative experience
☛ Laravel is built for latest version of PHP
☛ It is more object oriented compared to CodeIgniter
☛ Laravel community is still small, but it is growing very fast.

Codeigniter:
☛ CodeIgniter is a powerful PHP framework
☛ Simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications.
☛ Codeigniter is an older more mature framework
☛ It is less object oriented compared to Laravel.
☛ Codeigniter community is large.

PHP

You may access the current application environment via the environment method.

$environment = App::environment();
dd($environment);

If they haven't used other frameworks, that's OK. If they answer that they haven't used other frameworks then it's important to dig deep into these questions. If they have used other frameworks, ask about the differences and see if they are passionate about Laravel or just have jumped on the bandwagon.

On one hand, all optional components of Laravel (Cashier, Dusk, Valet, Socialite, etc.) do use semantic versioning. However, the Laravel framework itself does not. The reason for this is because semantic versioning is a "reductionist" way of determining if two pieces of code are compatible. Even when using semantic versioning, you still must install the upgraded package and run your automated test suite to know if anything is actually incompatible with your code base.

Answers to this question is NO.Laravel application’s are 100% secure (depends what you mean by “secure” as well), in terms of things you can do to prevent unwanted data/changes done without the user knowing.
Larevl have inbuilt CSRF security, input validations and encrypted session/cookies etc. Also, Laravel uses a high encryption level for securing Passwords.

With every update, there’s the possibility of new holes but you can keep up to date with Symfony changes and security issues on their site.

The following are the official packages provided by Laravel
☛ Cashier
☛ Envoy
☛ Passport
☛ Scout
☛ Socialite

PHP artisan is the command line interface/tool included with Laravel. It provides a number of helpful commands that can help you while you build your application easily. Here are the list of some artisian command.

☛ php artisan list
☛ php artisan help
☛ php artisan tinker
☛ php artisan make
☛ php artisan –versian
☛ php artisan make model model_name
☛ php artisan make controller controller_name

All Laravel routes are defined in your route files, which are located in the routes directory. These files are automatically loaded by the framework. The routes/web.php file defines routes that are for your web interface. These routes are assigned the web middleware group, which provides features like session state and CSRF protection. The routes in routes/api.php are stateless and are assigned the api middleware group. For most applications, you will begin by defining routes in your routes/web.php file.

To display html in laravel you can use below syntax.

{!! $your_var !!}

DB::connection()->enableQueryLog();

☛ Easy and consistent syntax
☛ Set-up process is easy
☛ customization process is easy
☛ code is always regimented with Laravel

Following are system requirements:

☛ PHP >= 5.4, PHP < 7
☛ Mcrypt PHP Extension
☛ OpenSSL PHP Extension
☛ Mbstring PHP Extension
☛ Tokenizer PHP Extension

Lumen is the micro-framework by Laravel that was made by Taylor specifically for APIs and microservices. If they've decided to use Lumen over Larvel for a microservice or API, it shows that they care about performance.

You can enable maintenance mode in Laravel 5, simply by executing below command.


//To enable maintenance mode
php artisan down
//To disable maintenance mode
php artisan up

Laravel’s Eloquent ORM is one the most popular PHP ORM (OBJECT RELATIONSHIP MAPPING).
It provides a beautiful, simple ActiveRecord implementation to work with your database.
In Eloquent each database table has the corresponding MODEL that is used to interact with table and perform a database related operation on the table.
Sample Model Class in Laravel.

namespace App;

use IlluminateDatabaseEloquentModel;

class Users extends Model
{

}

Tests knowledge of dependency injection in general, as well as applicant's understanding of Laravel's IoC works.

Active Record Implementation is an architectural pattern found in software engineering that stores in-memory object data in relational databases. Active Record facilitates the creation and use of business objects whose data is required to persistent in the database. Laravel implements Active Records by Eloquent ORM. Below is sample usage of Active Records Implementation is Laravel.

$product = new Product;

$product->title = 'Iphone 6s';

$product->save();
Active Record style ORMs map an object to a database row. In the above example, we would be mapping the Product object to a row in the products table of database.

Pros of using laravel Framework
☛ Laravel framework has in-built lightweight blade template engine to speed up compiling tasks, and create layouts with dynamic content easily.
☛ Hassles code reusability.
☛ Eloquent ORM with PHP active record implementation
☛ Built in command line tool “Artisan” for creating a code skeleton ,database structure and build their migration

Cons of using laravel Framework
☛ Development process requires you to work with standards and should have real understanding of programming
☛ Laravel is new framework and composer is not so strong in compare to npm (for node.js), ruby gems and python pip.
☛ Development in laravel is not so fast in compare to ruby on rails.
☛ Laravel is lightweight so it has less inbuilt support in compare to django and rails. But this problem can be solved by integrating third party tools, but for large and very custom websites it may be a tedious task

As HTML forms does not supports PUT, PATCH or DELETE request. So, when defining PUT, PATCH or DELETE routes that are called from an HTML form, you will need to add a hidden _method field to the form. The value sent with the _method field will be used as the HTTP request method:

<form action="/foo/bar" method="POST">
<input type="hidden" name="_method" value="PUT">
<input type="hidden" name="_token" value="{{ csrf_token() }}">
</form>
To generate the hidden input field _method, you may also use the method_field helper function:

<?php echo method_field('PUT'); ?>
In Blade template you can write it as below

{{ method_field('PUT') }}

Yes, Download the framework and use as per your requirement