App development in laravel compared to codeigniter

I am new to laravel development and confused how and where to start. I have been working on codeigniter all this while and have developed pretty huge web apps on it. Starting with laravel making a todo application or a single page site is fine but how about building a pretty good web application? How do I start my development?

Like in codeigniter I started writing all my core libraries required for my web application, all the API external calls resided in my libraries and had created set of models in the models folder of the application. There were helpers folder which allowed me to create set of helper functions which I needed before development. Coming to laravel Im confused how to start with. There is no library folder to create libraries or helper functions.There are mostly controllers and the model files remain outside and not arranged in a folder. May be my lack of experience in software development raised this question. Can someone help me on getting started up with laravel development?

1. Where do all the external api calls resides?
2. Is it in a controller or is there a way libraries can be build?
3. Is base controller called a library in laravel?
4. Where can I build my app logics in? Is it inside the controller?
5. Laravel doc says controller just routes the http requests and does the validation.Do I have to put all my business logic inside the model files?

via Chebli Mohamed