The second significant line, in public/index.php is to load the application. It looks like this:

$app = require_once __DIR__.'/../bootstrap/start.php';

This is from public/index.php

This aspect will take some time to explore! If we hop into that file, we see the first line creates a new Application instance:

$app = new Illuminate\Foundation\Application;

This is from bootstrap/start.php

Container

The Application class extends Illuminate\Container\Container. This is the first really major concept underpinning the Laravel codebase.

The Container class (sometimes referred to as the IoC Container) is an implementation of the Service Locator design pattern. The idea is that this one class acts as a registry for dependencies throughout an application. The dependencies (which are just other classes commonly instantiated) are registered so that they can be located and created at runtime.

IoC stands for Inversion of Control. It’s a reference to the SOLID Dependency Inversion Principle which states that; “high-level code shouldn’t depend on low-level code — both should depend on abstractions”. Instead of classes instantiating their own dependencies (referencing concrete implementations); classes accept dependencies which implement known interfaces. There’s more detail to the principle, which you can find in Taylor’s book: Laravel: From Apprentice To Artisan.

To demonstrate an example of this:

$container = new Container();



$container->bind("Acme\Class", function() {

return new Acme\Class();

});



$class = $container->make("Acme\Class");

As trite an example as that it; it illustrates about 80% of the usage of the IoC container. Laravel is filled with references to $this->app, which is this same Application instance.

You can learn more about the Service Locator design pattern at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_locator_pattern.

Application

Application extends Container, but it does more than that. The constructor looks like:

public function __construct(Request $request = null)

{

$this

->registerBaseBindings(

$request ?: $this->createNewRequest()

);



$this->registerBaseServiceProviders();



$this->registerBaseMiddlewares();

}

This is from vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Application.php

The Request defined here is a reference to Illuminate\Http\Request. We’ll look at this class, in more detail, in a later article. What you need to know about it now is that it encapsulates the logic behind HTTP request processing and data management. The registerBaseBindings() method looks like:

protected function registerBaseBindings($request)

{

$this->instance('request', $request);



$this->instance('Illuminate\Container\Container', $this);

}

This is from vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Application.php

This method stores a reference to the Request instance, in the Container storage. It uses the instance() method which differs slightly from bind() in that bind will create new instances when make() is called, while instance() and make() will return the same instance every time.

The behavior of the instance() method allows Laravel to restrict these classes to having a single instance, without building them according to the Singleton design pattern. You can learn more about the Singleton design pattern at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singleton_pattern.

This method also stores a reference to itself in the Container storage. That is to say — when someone requests the class Illuminate\Container\

Container from the container, they will get the shared instance of Illuminate\Foundation\Application. It’s interesting that it’s referred to by the full class path, but the reasons for that will become obvious when we look at the Container in greater depth.

Service Providers

The registerBaseServiceProviders() method looks like:

protected function registerBaseServiceProviders()

{

foreach (array('Event', 'Exception', 'Routing') as $name)

{

$this->{"register{$name}Provider"}();

}

}

This is from vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Application.php

Aside from demonstrating a badass use of dynamic method names in PHP, this method loops through an array of essential class names, and invokes methods to register the service provider for each.

We’ll just look at one of these (because they’re all the same):

protected function registerEventProvider()

{

$this->register(new EventServiceProvider($this));

}

This is from vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Application.php

All Service Providers are instantiated with a reference to the Application instance as the first constructor argument. This lets them pull dependencies from the Container storage, without needing to know the Application class’s full class path (and thereby be tightly coupled to it).

Service Providers are an organisational model for isolating components of functionality which can then be registered and run in a consistent manner. They have register() and boot() methods to this effect. Everything from databases to queues are registered through Service Providers. We’ll look as Service Providers in greater depth, in future articles.

So from this, we can see that the core Laravel application needs a request, events, exceptions and routing to be in place before dispatching to an action.

The last method called in the constructor is registerBaseMiddlewares(), which looks like:

protected function registerBaseMiddlewares()

{

$this->middleware('Illuminate\Http\FrameGuard');

}

This is from vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Application.php

A very simplified description of middleware (in the context of PHP frameworks) is that they are reusable libraries which implement a commonly agreed-upon design. This design allows these libraries to be used in many frameworks for the purposes of giving new input and shaping the output without actually affecting codebases.

The middleware pattern implemented, in the libraries Laravel uses, is based on StackPHP.

The FrameGuard middleware looks like this:

public function handle(

SymfonyRequest $request,

$type = HttpKernelInterface::MASTER_REQUEST,

$catch = true

)

{

$response = $this->app->handle(

$request,

$type,

$catch

);



$response->headers->set(

'X-Frame-Options',

'SAMEORIGIN',

false

);



return $response;

}

This is from vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Http/FrameGuard.php

This method gets the response from Laravel (the entire response after dispatching to the action) and adds a header to it. The SymfonyRequest referenced here is Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request. HttpKernelInterface also comes from Symfony…