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Video platform: a customizable, rich media solution | 17

For the second question, I found a lot of articles explaining the benefits of Laravel. However the Laravel documentation
speaks for itself [3]. In a very clear way the documentation explains how the Laravel framework is designed and how
programmers should work with it. Some very clear benefits that Laravel had over other PHP frameworks was that Laravel
1
was using RESTFUL urls or routes as they are called in Laravel. What this means is that you give the routes that you have
made either a POST or GET (or any HTTP protocol) keyword, and then that URL or route will behave accordingly to the
protocol. Very handy, and a safe measure that gives Laravel an extra bit of protection. In figure 6 you can find a table of
RESTFUL routes examples.
Another big benefit of using Laravel is that it also works with Eloquent, this means that you don’t work with SQL queries
anymore (however, you can still query SQL). From a table in the database a model is created. Now this model represents
the table, and you can use the model as a PHP variable. You can call this variable anything you want and you can retrieve
from this variable any column and rows of information of that database table. Very handy.

Figure 6: example of Laravel routes

4.2.3 Results
After researching the two research questions I had gathered quite some knowledge of MVC and of Laravel as a framework.
Using a MVC is a must when working with big projects like the video platform. It separates
the different parts of the project into their respective places. A big problem of large
projects is that the developer loses track of the files and the codes that he/she has written.
Using an MVC this problem is quickly fixed. There are the special folders that contain the
specific files; and even on the coding level, it is separated. A model is used to store the
data and retrieve it. A controller contains the logic of the application. And in the view you Figure 7: Laravel framework logo
can find the output representation that the user can see. While at some very small projects
a developer decides to not use a MVC and program everything from scratch; this could be quite doable. But whenever the
project grows in size, it’s just bad programming habit not using a MVC.

During my research into what the benefits were of Laravel as a MVC, I was quite amazed with the framework. The
framework is not that old, and it already is beating a lot of the much older PHP frameworks in design and its workings.
Some big major points of Laravel were the RESTFUL routes and the use of ELOQUENT.

1: REST stands for Representational State Transfer. (It is sometimes spelled "ReST".) It relies on a stateless, client-server, cacheable
communications protocol -- and in virtually all cases, the HTTP protocol is used. Retrieved from: http://rest.elkstein.org/2008/02/what-is-rest.html