Continuing on their series about context in Laravel applications, the Culttt.com blog has posted the next part talking about setting the context of the application. In this case the term "context" relates to the "operating environment" the request is happening in (not to be confused with the environment, things like the server/software installed).

Last week we looked at managing context in a Laravel application. Context is a very important aspect of a web application as this foundational structure will be relied upon for almost every piece of code. Setting the context usually involves checking against the business rules of the application.

For example, does the current user have access to this group? Does the current task belong to this project? Can this user create a new post in this thread? These kind of foundational business rules need to be addressed whenever a request enters the application.

He starts by talking about the importance of the URL the user is requesting, pointing out that it should be both useful to identify the resource and provide a "sense of hierarchy" for the application. He then shows how to, using the "Guard" handling in Laravel, to define the context and ensure that the user is operating within an allowed context. Full code is included to set up the system and creating the objects to resolve the group and request information into something useful.