Laravel 4 provides a way to separate controllers and business logic from the presentation layer through its Views feature. Instead of outputting a view directly to the client, you can render it into a local variable. This is especially useful when you need to further process the view as a string, such as generating a PDF of the web page. Laravel 4's View::make()->render() method allows you to accomplish this.

Learn how to use environments in Laravel 4 to develop your application in a way that responds to its running environment. Environments allow for automatic changes to database servers and cache drivers. Check the current environment in your code using the App::environment() method and perform different actions based on the result.