Laravel 9: An insight into the new features of the Latest Major Release

PHP frameworks like Laravel have been a very popular choice for years. Its scalability and exquisiteness have even made it to be called the de facto framework for companies and developers working with PHP and contributing a great deal towards software development in Bangalore. Laravel 9 is the latest release that comes with many new features.

Laravel has released new versions every six months till now which raised questions, harsh comments, as well as confusion about the new release process. Followed by the release of Laravel 9 in February 2022, this framework, therefore, is set to release major updates every 12 months.

As a renowned mobile app development company, in this article, we tried to analyze the key features of Laravel 9 as well as how to upgrade to Laravel 9 and e-commerce by developing web applications using the same.

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Below are mentioned the tentative dates of upcoming releases, and these had been taken from the releases support policy documentation:

Long-term support for Laravel 9, though, will continue through February 2024, and security fixes will go through February 2025.

What Is Laravel?

Laravel basically refers to an open-source PHP web application framework that is known for its elegant syntax. It is an MVC framework that aids in building simple to complex web applications using the PHP programming language, and strictly following the MVC i.e. model–view–controller architectural pattern.

If you haven’t used Laravel yet, you can read on to learn about what Laravel is and take a peek at our list of excellent Laravel tutorials to get started.

Salient Features of Laravel

In case you’re new to this framework, we’ve compiled some of the best Laravel features to provide you with a better understanding.

Eloquent ORM

Object-relational mapping (ORM) for Laravel is more commonly known as Eloquent, and it directs to one of the best aspects of Laravel, for it provides seamless connections along with data models and databases.

Laravel’s eloquent abstraction enables you to interact with your database without any need to write complex SQL queries. Thus, with Eloquent ORM, Laravel abstracts almost every hurdle involving interacting with as well as writing complex SQL queries to access data quickly from your database.

Artisan CLI

The Artisan CLI, aka command line, is another crucial aspect of Laravel. It assists you to create or modify any part of Laravel from the command line without navigating through multiple folders and files.

Artisan makes it even possible to interact with the database directly from your command line using Laravel Tinker — and all this can happen without installing a database client.

MVC-Based Architecture

Laravel’s architecture usually follows a common web development pattern that is continually improving, thereby rendering it a more relatable and adaptable language. 

To use Laravel, you need to learn and understand the MVC architectural pattern, which is more popular and has almost been used in all frameworks, such as AdonisJS from JavaScript and/ or ASP.NET MVC from C#.

Using Automatic Pagination

Have you ever struggled with pagination while building your applications? Well, if you have, then certainly you’ll understand the value of having the pagination sorted out well by a built-in framework. Laravel solves this pagination hassle by taking an approach of building automatic pagination that is so right out of the box. This feature is among one of its most praiseworthy ones, that eliminates the load of work involved in solving the pagination mystery by yourself.

Security 

It’s essential to analyze the security measures of any web app that you’re considering using as a lack of due diligence can ultimately result in loss of funds and even hijacking of your site or product.

Laravel comes with several security measures because of its adherence to the OWASP security principles. From cross-site request forgery- CSRF to SQL injection, Laravel offers a built-in solution for it all.

Laravel 9- What is to look for?

Initially, Laravel 9’s release was scheduled to be by September 2021, which was then pushed to January 2022 and later February 2022, thereby making it the first long-term support or LTS release to be introduced following the 12-month release cycle. This delay results from multiple reasons, which include the following:

1. Laravel uses several community-driven projects and almost nine Symfony libraries. Symfony released its version 6.0 by November 2021 which allowed the Laravel team to include this new version of Symfony as a part of Laravel 9.
2. The delay further aided the team time to monitor how Laravel interacts with this new version of Symfony for two months which further gives them room to correct if there were any breaking changes or bugs.
3. Lastly, delaying Laravel 9 equips the Laravel team in a better way for yearly future releases. After Symfony’s release, it gave the team two months of additional ramp-up time.

For these reasons, well, you can see why the delay in release is worth waiting for.

There are a good number of leading-edge technology features in Laravel 9 that you might be interested in, Let’s explore a quick list of these features.

New Features in Laravel 9

explore the list of the features and improvements we can expect in the upcoming major release of Laravel.

PHP 8.0- The Minimum Requirement for Laravel 9.

Laravel 9 provides route lists, which were missed in previous versions. The console of course had a hard time managing large routes.

Laravel 9 requires the latest PHP 8 that has got significant improvements as well as features from the JIT compiler. Laravel 9 will be using the latest Symfony v6.0, which also requires PHP 8. You can explore various PHP version benchmarks to learn how to upgrade to the latest PHP 8 on our blog.

Redesign of routes: list

The routes: list commands that have been in Laravel for a while, can sometimes be a bit of a hassle to see the routes in the console if they are huge and complex, which has been taken care of.

Themes Improved in Laravel 9

Developers can work more efficiently with Laravel 9 thanks to the New Query Builder Interface.

With Laravel 9, a number of features required by Laravel 8 have been added, such as support for Symfony 6.0. With Fly system 3.0, the performance has been improved over previous versions.

Laravel 9 has been designed in an effort to solve the bugs and usability issues encountered in the past.

Anonymous Stub Migration

Migrations that use anonymous stubs are by default in Laravel’s latest version when you run the popular migration command: 

PHP artisan make: migration

The anonymous stub migration feature was initially released in Laravel 8.37 in response to the Github issue- the issue of multiple migrations with the same class name that can cause problems when trying to recreate the database even from scratch. The latest stub migration feature eliminates migration class name collisions.

New Query Builder Interface

With the latest Laravel 9, type hinting is extremely reliable for refactoring, static analysis as well as code completion in their IDEs. Due to the lack of any shared interface or inheritance between the Query\Builder, Eloquent\Builder, and Eloquent\Relation. Still, with Laravel 9, developers have the option now to enjoy the new query builder interface for type hinting, refactoring, along with static analysis.

<?php

return Model:query()

->whereNotExists(function($query) {

// $query is a Query\Builder

})

->whereHas(‘relation’, function($query) {

// $query is an Eloquent\Builder

})

->with (‘relation’, function($query) {

// $query is an Eloquent\Relation

});

This version added the newest Illuminate\Contracts\Database\Query Builder interface, as well as the Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Concerns\Decorates Query Builder trait to implement the interface in place of the __call magic method.

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PHP 8 String Functions

Since Laravel 9 implemented PHP 8, Laravel merged this PR, and suggested using the most recent PHP 8 string functions. These string functions include the use of str_contains(), str_starts_with(), and str_ends_with() internally in the \Illuminate\Support\Str class.

Tom Schlick acknowledged that a PR had already been submitted to move to this approach for the upcoming PHP 8 release.

Laravel 9’s features and improvements listed above are a sneak peek at what is to come. It’ll most definitely bring lots of bug fixes, features, and, of course, many breaking changes.

Symfony Mailer Replaces the Swift Mailer

The Symfony Mailer that was deprecated in Laravel 9 has been replaced with the Symfony Mailer. The PR includes additional information about the breaking changes as a result.

Laravel 9- Installation Guide

Installation Guide for Laravel 9!!!

If you want to get started with Laravel 9 for development and testing purposes, you can then install and run it on your local machine. Since Laravel 9 supports PHP version 8, if you’re planning to test it, make sure that you are keeping a check on your PHP version or initiate a fresh install.

You can discover more details about the latest release via Packagist.

To install Laravel 9 using composer, you need to run the following command:

composer create-project –prefer-dist laravel/laravel laravel-9-dev dev-develop

The command will create a new Laravel project with the project name being laravel-9-dev, as we know, Laravel- 9 is still under development (hence dev-develop).

The second method is to use Laravel global CLI so that a new Laravel project can be created conveniently while choosing to create your new project from the dev branch.

You need to enter the following command to craft a new Laravel 9 project:

laravel new laravel-9-dev –dev

Now that Laravel 9 is successfully installed, you can enter (laravel-dev) in the new directory and execute the artisan command further to check the version:

cd laravel-9-dev

php artisan –version

It should be ready to present you with the development version of Laravel 9. Voilà!

Wrapping Up

Laravel is no doubt a compelling PHP framework that is gaining significant attention these days among developers. Laravel 9, apparently, is the first one that is following a 12-month release cycle giving us an opportunity to experience all its new features. Having the best web solution for your users is definitely the end goal of Laravel 9’s creators, and that is the reason they always come up with new and updated versions every year. It took them almost two years for Laravel 9.

You can develop web apps easily with the new features in Laravel 9 in this version and we can assist you in upgrading your Laravel 8 application further to Laravel 9 if you rely on us as your partner Laravel app development company and utilize our topmost Laravel app development services. For all further queries, you can get in touch with the proficient developers from Indglobal- the top-rated mobile app development company in India.

The Laravel team is most likely to announce new features and updates in the near future. So, make sure you bookmark this post as we are going to cover them in future updates.

Let us know what you are looking forward to with Laravel 9. Put your comments in the section below.