
Laravel 7 - tpetry
https://laravel.com/docs/7.x/releases
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tpaschalis
I've worked with Laravel in the past few months. Having never worked with PHP,
I went from _eew PHP?!_ to a delightful, fast-paced development model. It
shows that good documentation and listening to your user-base will get an Open
Source project really far.

It just gets even small things right, nice testing support, database
migrations, request validations, events and broadcasting, you name it!

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oflannabhra
One of the most interesting things about the Laravel ecosystem is how an open
source project has allowed multiple independent businesses spring up around
the core project that facilitate things like management, deployment, etc. I
know laravel is not unique in this respect, and that lots of the tooling
around it is from Taylor Otwell (founder) but there are lots of others as
well.

I’ve always been impressed by how developer quality of life is such a high
priority goal of Laravel. I think much of its adoption, and the successful
businesses that have sprung up around it is a validation that they’ve done
that right.

~~~
smartstakestime
do you work with Laravel ... it has not advanced dev quality of life. It has
great marketing and has grabbed a % of the dev base so lots of people work
with it. It has done nothing better than symfony, codeigniter, Zendframework.

I feel it breeds bad coding habbits, many coders like it simplicity but when
they use it they implement many inefficient functions, mostly around querying
the database. Laravel has this robust query builder api so you have many
novices accessing the database through it without understanding what they are
doing.

I dont really know what "quality of life" is provided by Laravel. Its just
another MVC.

~~~
jjeaff
Quality of life is better because you can build so much, so quickly with
laravel. There is a ton that laravel can bootstrap for you out of the box and
then add to that the very large ecosystem of plugins that has come out of the
community.

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fareesh
Laravel is great - makes getting routine things done in PHP a lot less
bothersome with the ol' convention over configuration philosophy that Rails
introduced.

I've used it for several web applications running in production and have
always been very pleased with what it has to offer. The documentation is
pretty good too.

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Raed667
I love Laravel and used it for several projects. My only issue with it
currently is its landing page. Where I can't easily distinguish Free parts of
the ecosystem and Paid parts. And have to go over each component landing page
to see the pricing.

For example they show Passport which is a free OAuth2 library exactly the same
way as Nova which is a pay-per-project admin dashboard.

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kugelblitz
I've stopped using since Laravel 5.4, switched to Symfony 2.8 up to now (5.0)
and recently also Flask or Django (at least for back end).

My biggest pains were the facades and also I wasn't a big fan of the Active
Records (with the empty classes and only doing autocomplete by regularly
generating loads of annotations).

Being a freelancer and the increasing popularity, I suppose it's worth taking
a look again.

Though I'm still a bit hesitant to use it for my own long-term projects,
especially since there are so many breaking changes and there are some side
projects I won't be able to update for 3 to 12 months while I work freelance
or build up new projects.

Can anyone share their experience using + updating a Laravel-based website
which is at least 2 years old, especially regarding maintainability?

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justanotherc
I was turned off of Laravel from a bad experience of the very reason you're
afraid of it. Back in 2017 I was hired to take over a large Laravel 4.2
project, which included upgrading it to 5.0+ version. The upgrade was a very
long, extremely painful experience, and Laravel itself progressed from 5.0 to
5.2 during our upgrade so it was like trying to hit a moving target.

I know there is a lot of capability wrapped up in the framework which enables
rapid development, but for long lived applications, you're going to spend a
not-insignificant amount of your time keeping up with upgrades. So in a sense,
the framework itself becomes technical debt. That makes it a bad framework
from my point of view.

Your code base should not be forced to be so tightly coupled to the framework
that you have to spend time updating it to keep up with the framework versions
(or get stuck on an old version).

~~~
kugelblitz
Yeah, my first Laravel application (actually my first use of a framework) was
Laravel 4.2 because my personal project was getting more and more complex.

When I wanted to upgrade, reading this did make me wonder a bit: "The
recommended method of upgrading is to create a new Laravel 5.0 install and
then to copy your 4.2 site's unique application files into the new
application. This would include controllers, routes, Eloquent models, Artisan
commands, assets, and other code specific to your application."

My worry was: "Do I have to do this with every version??!"

Fortunately not, but the updates did take some time; I still updated a few
minor versions before moving to Symfony.

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mmmuhd
We are ever grateful to Taylor otwel and the team for developing and
maintaining Laravel, ever wonder why most of us African web developers use
Laravel as a web framework? Because it works and fast without much need for
fancy tweaks (here a decent internet is still a luxury in most parts of the
continent), Laravel allows you to spring up a decent web app fast without much
hassle, you can easily set it up in the cloud and it will be up and running
with need for maintenance and site reliability issues. More grease to your
elbows Taylor and the rest of the Laravel team.

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hu3
> Major framework releases are released every six months...

Two major versions with breaking changes per year? This seems a bit too fast
paced for my taste.

But I haven't used the framework and would love the input of someone that had
to maintain a Laravel project for more than a year.

~~~
yurishimo
The changes in each major version are pretty small. They’re sticking to
semantic versioning now so if there is a major version bump, it’s likely a
small change to some internal library that would only be breaking in the
technical sense.

Plus, this is the pace the framework has adopted for a long time now so most
of the devs in the ecosystem are used to doing an upgrade once or twice a
year. Generally they’re very quick. < 15 min.

~~~
wishinghand
> They’re sticking to semantic versioning now

I will believe that when I see it.

edit: to clarify, historically they've bumped the minor version number
whenever they had major changes in the API, and now the major version bumps
are usually non-breaking changes. I don't think the team fully understands
Semver.

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kyriakos
Great work going in this framework, along with Symfony are a driving force for
PHP. This is no-bullshit tool for making web sites where most details are
thought out. It may be opinionated but if you learn and follow it instead of
working against it you can have a super quick turnaround from concept to
production.

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BilalBudhani
Laravel seems to be doing great. The number of improvements in DX and the
ecosystem is moving at a nice pace. I often compare it with Ruby On Rails
framework (my primary stack) which is unfortunately not focusing much on DX
anymore.

For instance, Laravel has been consistently improving authentication by
providing official packages right into the framework. Whereas, Rails still
doesn't have an official gem backed into the framework. The recent change of
hands of "devise" gem would have been a great opportunity for Rails to take it
over.

~~~
andreygrehov
What is DX?

~~~
cies
I guess: developer experience

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mici
Laravel Airlock is my favorite thing about this release. I already started
using it for one of my sites, it makes API authentication so much easier than
it used to be with Passport.

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samspenc
As a long-time PHP developer, I love Laravel, all of its features, and how the
community has built around it, but there are a couple of pain points I felt
when I used it last year, not sure if these have improved:

1\. Very difficult to get running in shared hosting.

2\. Feels a bit heavyweight for a SPA (Single Page Application) where the
Javascript front-end framework (e.g. Angular, React) is doing most of the
work, and the PHP Laravel backend is just processing the CRUD APIs in REST.

~~~
dbbk
For the SPA case they have a slimmed down version called Lumen.

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thinkindie
two things I noticed: 1) the great majority of features were authored or
contributed by Taylor Otwell - in any cases he was the only name next to each
feature. How this is sustainable in the long term? 2) it is still using a lot
of singletone/static methods and so on, how they can promote some solid
testing culture?

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npv789
kudos for Taylor Otwell

