# Introduction

# About Laravel

Laravel is a popular (more precisely, the most popular!) PHP web application framework

Laravel is free, open-source software
Laravel is based on Symfony (opens new window)
Laravel follows the model-view-controller (MVC) architectural pattern
Laravel's aim is to make development an enjoyable and creative experience by easing common tasks (authentication, database migrations/seeding, routing, templating, ...) used in most web projects
Laravel was originally developed by Taylor Otwell in 2011 as a more advanced alternative to the CodeIgniter framework
Current stable version (October 2022) is 9.34.0

Laravel MVC pattern

In addition to Laravel, in this course we also use other tools to increase usability
The so-called TALL stack (opens new window) consists of the following four components:
- Tailwind CSS:
  Tailwind CSS (opens new window) is a utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom user interfaces without writing your own CSS
- Alpine.js:
  Alpine.js (opens new window) is a tiny JavaScript framework composing Javascript behavior directly in your HTML markup and works perfectly with Livewire because it is developed by the same creator
- Livewire:
  Livewire (opens new window) is a full-stack framework for Laravel that makes building dynamic/interactive view components easy, without leaving the comfort of Laravel and uses JavaScript that you don't have to write yourself
- Laravel

TIP

Since we added Jetstream's authentication at the start of this project, all TALL stack components are already present
Jetstream itself contains a bunch of TALL stack components