Laravel: Up and Running

Chapter 4. Blade Templating

Compared to most other backend languages, PHP actually functions relatively well as a templating language. But it has its shortcomings, and it’s also just ugly to be using <?php inline all over the place, so you can expect most modern frameworks to offer a templating language.

Laravel offers a custom templating engine called Blade, which is inspired by .NET’s Razor engine. It boasts a concise syntax, a shallow learning curve, a powerful and intuitive inheritance model, and easy extensibility.

For a quick look at what writing Blade looks like, check out Example 4-1.

Example 4-1. Blade samples

<h1>{{ $group->title }}</h1>
{!! $group->heroImageHtml() !!}

@forelse ($users as $user)
    • {{ $user->first_name }} {{ $user->last_name }}<br>
@empty
    No users in this group.
@endforelse

As you can see, Blade introduces a convention in which its custom tags, called “directives,” are prefixed with an @. You’ll use directives for all of your control structures and also for inheritance and any custom functionality you want to add.

Blade’s syntax is clean and concise, so at its core it’s just more pleasant and tidy to work with than the alternatives. But the moment you need anything of any complexity in your templates—nested inheritance, complex conditionals, or recursion—Blade starts to really shine. Just like the best Laravel components, it takes complex application requirements and makes them easy and accessible.

Additionally, since all Blade syntax is compiled into ...