BlogWhats New in Laravel 5.5?
Laravel 5.5 is due to be released in this month (July
2017), in every new release of the frameworks there's always some new features to investigate, so let's take a
look at what's new.
01. The next LTS (Long Tern Support) Release
After Laravel 5.1, Laravel 5.5 is scheduled to be the
next LTS release. This includes two years of bug fixes and three years of
security updates.
02. Require PHP 7.0+
Laravel 5.5 will require PHP 7.0+. Along with
developer features, PHP 7 includes speed improvements which will decrease CPU
load by half. So, you should definitely make this upgrade. And if you are
using Laravel 5, making this upgrade will be a lot easier since you using the
latest version of PHP.
03. Package auto recovery
Now you will get option only get the features and
files you want to see from vendor’s folder. Before it, the folder will show all
the data inside it. And it will automatically register all service providers.
04. Rendering Mailables to the Browser
It can be tedious to test your email templates across
email clients. One way to test them is to render them to the browser so that
you can make instant changes. But it is not an easy task. Luckily, Laravel 5.5
adds the facility to display them directly from your routes.
This is similar to migrate:refresh but rather than
rolling back your existing migrations, it drops all tables and migrates them
from start. The difference between rolling back migrations and dropping tables
is that rolling back migrations runs the drop method for each of them.
Whilst, the migrate:fresh command simply drops all off
of the tables and starts from scratch.
06. Frontend Presets
Out of the box, Laravel includes some CSS and
JavaScript scaffolding to help accelerate coding. Although you could remove
them and start over with your personal preferences, the suggestion was only
limited to the Vue framework. Laravel 5.5 introduces 3 frontend presets:
Bootstrap, Vue, React and an option choose your own.
07. Custom validation rules
Laravel 5.5 is coming with a new feature for adding
custom validation rules. Custom validation rules are nothing new but with
Laravel 5.5 you can have a dedicated class to handle the validation.
08. THROW IF AND THROW UNLESS helpers
New to Laravel 5.5 are two exception helper functions
and i know we do love helper functions. I thought to myself the first time i
saw these functions whether we really need helper functions to throw exceptions
based on a particular condition, but once i start using this, it actually made
sense and cleaned up code.
09. Model Factory Generators
Laravel 5.5 comes with a feature called model
factories that are designed to allow you to quickly build out “fake” models.
10. Streamlined
Request Validation
Laravel 5.5 comes with two changes to Request feature.
One is that you can now directly call the validate method on your “Request”
instance. So instead of using the controller validator, you can call the
validator on your “Request” instance. You also no longer need to pass the
request as the first argument to the validator.
