What Does Laravel 5.5 Update Mean For The Web Developers?

24
Feb 2018

Posted by: Category:Web Design & Development

Laravel 5.5 was released on 30th August, 2017 and is the latest version of popular open source PHP web framework. This version will have speed improvements that will decrease the CPU load by about half along with developer features for operation. This updated version of Laravel offers bug fixes for 2 years and security updates for 3 years. This feature makes it Long term Support (LTS) release since the two year window of Laravel 5.1 bug fix benefits has come to an end.

What does Laravel 5.5 update mean for the Web Developers?

Let us take a look at the features of Laravel 5.5 and see how it will help the developers and what makes it different than other versions.

  • Front end Presets : Laravel 5.5 has introduced Bootstrap, Vue and React. By default, the preset is set Vue and can be changed to React or Bootstrap. We can change the preset to react using the command php artisan preset react. Or if you don’t want to work with any of the front-end scaffolding, use the command php artisan preset none.
  • Introduces The migrate:fresh command : The new command php artisan migrate:fresh works similar to the migrate:fresh command. However, while migrate:fresh rolls back all the migrations, migrate:fresh drops all the tables and run the existing migrations from scratch. This new command is useful when working with foreign key constraints or there is down() method in the migration that has not been well defined.
  • Whoops! : Whoops! Simplifies the error debugging process to a large extent. It not only points out the exact line of the code which caused the error and marks a stack trace to the error with a screenshot, but also allows direct access to the reference files in the editor or IDE–the PHP-source files should be locally accessible for this feature.
  • Custom Validation Rules : Laravel 5.5 has made it simple and refines to create custom validation rule with a new artisan command, $ php artisan make:rule FooBarRule. This command of Laravel creates a new FooBarRule class in the application rules directory and extends a Rule contract which compels it to apply the passes and message methods. This gives the scope to define the validator logic and error message.
  • Automatic Package Discovery : In previous versions of Laravel, developers had to install package from third party package, register its services and all the aliases through the package’s composer.json file. But in Laravel 5.5, the process is simple with its automatic package discovery feature.
  • Exception Helper Functions : Laravel 5.5 allows you to write more expensive code with its two exception helper functions: throw_if and throw_unless methods. These functions work exactly the same way and can help in reducing a conditional block to a single line when you want to throw an exception based on a condition.
  • Customised Email Layouts and Themes : Laravel 5.5 allows developers to use custom email themes for mailables. A developer simply needs to create a custom .css file that specifies the style requirement. This simple feature will let the developer alter the email layout as per requirements and can be very impactful with respect to branding.

Thus we can see that there are several new updates to the latest version of Laravel. The developers will have it easy to develop websites and add the latest features to it.

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