Laravel 4: how can I understand how it all works? - laravel

Question

I am using Laravel 3 in one project and it's been a joy. I have also looked at the source code several times to see how some things work behind the scenes.
But now in Laravel 4, I don't know where to begin or how to understand it all. Where can I learn all the behind the scenes of Laravel 4?
Case in point: I wanted to find out if the DB::insert() returns the id of inserted row. So I started searching.
1. I found the Illuminate\Support\Facades\Facade class that "encapsulates" DB.
2. The resolveFacadeInstance function is called and then I tried to print these arrays, but my computer hangs :-/. And I'm sure this would lead to many more classes that I wouldn't understand.
Is there a way I could try to learn the inner workings of Laravel 4? Maybe stack traces?

Answer 1

The facade class is just a filter class to allow you to call methods as if they were static.
For the facade mappings go here: http://laravel.com/docs/facades#facade-class-reference
The starting point to fully understand laravel's inner-workings should begin at:
/public/index.php
You can follow the logic of the program, noticing that requires start.php, which loads an instance of the "Application" which is found here:
/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Application.php

Answer 2

This Tuts+ video shows a couple of ways of finding out what class is actually doing the work.
E.g.:
$root = get_class(DB::getFacadeRoot());
var_dump($root);

Answer 3

You can check out the early docs for Laravel 4 here : http://four.laravel.com/ – that should give you a good starting point

Answer 4

The actual Laravel 4 code is well documented in the files. If you want to understand the inner workings then open up the source code files and read the notes. For example I looked up the DB::insert() code in /vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Application.php.
/**
* Run an insert statement against the database.
*
* #param string $query
* #param array $bindings
* #return bool
*/
public function insert($query, $bindings = array())
{
return $this->statement($query, $bindings);
}
Ok, so this is calling the statement function so I search for function statement in the same code / class:
/**
* Execute an SQL statement and return the boolean result.
*
* #param string $query
* #param array $bindings
* #return bool
*/
public function statement($query, $bindings = array())
{
return $this->run($query, $bindings, function($me, $query, $bindings)
{
if ($me->pretending()) return true;
$bindings = $me->prepareBindings($bindings);
return $me->getPdo()->prepare($query)->execute($bindings);
});
}
We can now see that this returns the boolean result based on the comments above the code.

Answer 5

If you come from Laravel 3 this article is for you. After that you should read the other tutorials of that series.
Author's note:
This article should outline some of the more important changes to Laravel between versions 3 and the upcoming version 4. Bear in mind
this isn’t all of the changes. As the release of Laravel 4 gets closer
I’ll keep this article up to date. If you’re having any problems with
Laravel 4 please jump on to #laravel on Freenode. At this time we’d
like to ask people not to post help topics on the forums.