What's New in Laravel 8?
Laravel is an open source PHP framework that provides elegant syntax and built-in features to design and develop web applications with ease. This framework comes with MVC (Model View Controller) architecture and runs in the backend side of web development.
Looking back onto Laravel 6, Laravel has many great improvements. It now has semantic versioning which supports parsing, increments, and comparisons and its update will be released in every six months. But with the arrival of Laravel 8, the features have been moved up to a great level. These laravel latest features include Laravel Jetstream, model directory, migration squashing, rate limiting improvements, model factory classes, time testing helpers, dynamic blade components and, much more. Let's see how each release process works.
Laravel 8 is now released with some latest features
- Laravel Jetstream
- Models Directory
- Migration Squashing
- Rate Limiting Improvements
- Model Factory Classes
- Time Testing Helpers
- Dynamic Blade Components
#1. Laravel Jetstream
The Jetstream is based on the existing Laravel user interface with an improved version which provides the base for new projects including registration, email verification, login feature, two-step authentication, session management, API support, and team management.
#2. Models Directory
The backend structure of Laravel 8 includes Models or App directory. Without this directory, the framework application will keep models inside the app folder with all generator commands.
#3. Migration Squashing
This feature is useful in the case where an application contains many migration files. This feature allows you to squash them in a single SQL file where the same file will be executed first during a migration run and then the later files which are not the part of the squashed file system will be running. Squashing existing migrations reduces migration file burden and improves system performance.
#4. Rate Limiting Improvements
Laravel 8 has made present rate limiting functionality much more flexible. This flexibility comes with the already existing backward compatibility which has an existing throttle middleware.
#5. Model Factory Classes
Laravel 8 introduced class-based Model Factories. These class based model factories increase support for connections between factories that means a single user can now have many posts.
#6.Time Testing Helpers
Laravel 8 provides appropriate test helpers that manipulate time within tests for the user. With earlier versions of Laravel, a user can exploit full control over the modification of time using their impressive carbon PHP library. Now you can even reset time between each test that will improves the user experience to great level.
#7. Dynamic Blade Components
Laravel 8 provides X Dynamic Component feature which is used for rendering a blade component dynamically at runtime level.
Even though with all these new features in laravel, Laravel will keep on surprising us with major framework releases in every six months. Each new Laravel update release provides a long window of support and maintenance. General releases provide bug fixes in every six months and security updates in every one year.