Laravel 5 released

https://laravel-news.com/2015/02/laravel-5-released/

by pyprism • 11 years ago

217 106 11 years ago

ponyous2• 11 years ago

I love the `Architecture Foundations` section in documentation [1]. I wonder why more frameworks don't do this. It happens a lot that I have no idea where to put files when I start with some frameworks. I am still not sure how good it is but I am reading through it right now.

[1] http://laravel.com/docs/master/providers

vruiz• 11 years ago

Looks like some links are broken. For example http://laravel.com/docs/authentication redirects to -> http://laravel.com/docs/4.2/authentication which is 404.

jbrooksuk• 11 years ago

Seems to be working fine here. Try again?

smacktoward• 11 years ago

It wouldn't be the first time. When Laravel 4 came out, they decided the best way to announce that would be to make all the old URLs for Laravel 3 documentation point to Laravel 4 pages, and then take down the Laravel 3 documentation completely.

Yes. Completely. Not just "put it in a less prominent place" or "hide it six levels deep in the directory hierarchy" -- it was gone, overnight. Poof! Vanished.

I happened to be in the middle of a Laravel 3 project at the time, so the sudden removal of all documentation for the version I was working with was more than a little painful.

colinramsay• 11 years ago

There's an article specifically about the release here:

https://laravel-news.com/2015/02/laravel-5-released/

It might be a better way to get an overview of this release as it links to various other articles about v5.

An article specifically on the changes:

https://laravel-news.com/2015/01/laravel-5/

bdg• 11 years ago

Thanks. I always find the release notes far more informative than a commit.

sctb• 11 years ago

Thanks, we changed the URL from https://github.com/laravel/laravel/releases.

Scarbutt• 11 years ago

Can you really write beautiful code in PHP?

coldtea3• 11 years ago

Sure. PHP, especially post 5.4 has matured a lot and offers as many niceties as your favorite blub language. It has its warts, but at this point, nothing worse than what Javascript has for example.

That said, while you can write beautiful code in PHP, IMHO, Laravel is not that.

It full of "string typing", over-applied and mis-applied Design Patterns, and poorly thought abstractions.

It just saddens me that Laravel is considered well designed and advanced codebase, or, worse, a standard of how PHP should be coded.

While it's not as bad as the Wordpress spaghetti, it is mostly Java EE (circa 2004) in PHP, sans the strong typing assurances (and, fortunately, sans the gobs of XML too).

On the other hand, Laravel works and has a strong community going for it, which, as in the case of Wordpress, makes all the difference in the world.

xoe26• 11 years ago

Can you give an example of a well designed PHP codebase?

Are any of the other frameworks (Symfony2, Zend, etc..) better?

trebor• 11 years ago

A lot of the over engineering in Laravel comes from Symphony, which in turn inspires how Laravel is built. And with the Proxy pattern in use everywhere, it inspires high coupling in your code in a way that doesn't quite look like coupling but is nonetheless.

graystevens• 11 years ago

For those currently using Laravel, here are some upgrade guides due to the large changes from 4 -> 5

http://laravel.com/docs/master/upgrade

http://mattstauffer.co/blog/upgrading-from-laravel-4-to-lara...

saluki• 11 years ago

If you're new to Laravel or want to learn more check out http://Laracasts.com. Jeff Way does a great job. (Just a fan/current subscriber).

lukeholder3• 11 years ago

I agree, awesome resource which is rapidly levelling up many modern php developers.

Matachines2• 11 years ago

Jeffrey Way is the best. Back at Tuts+ I'd only watch his courses—no one else was as good of a teacher as him. Laracasts is even better.

cozuya• 11 years ago

His 30 days to learn jQuery was a critical growing tool for me - if you're at all interested in low-level front end JS, definitely check it out. Its free.

pwenzel• 11 years ago

Agreed. Definitely worth paying for.

brianbreslin2• 11 years ago

What are the main advantages of Laravel over say Cake or Symfony?

BaconJuice• 11 years ago

Let's add Codeigniter to the list too. Need a pitch for the employer.

brianbreslin2• 11 years ago

I thought codeigniter was dead? I could have sworn they announced 2 years ago it was no longer going to be developed.

WA• 11 years ago

I just started with Laravel and can't compare it really well to the other frameworks, but this is what I like so far:

- it's well-documented

- it has an active community

- I simply enjoy working with it. It feels lightweight, although it probably isn't, if I take a good look at the "vendor" folder and the dependencies

- I get stuff done relatively quickly

Edit: So I started porting my small Laravel 4 project to 5 and to be honest, my first impression is: Laravel 5 is more like Zend Framework than the small and nice PHP framework. It lost a bit of its lightweight flair for a potentially more structured architecture, but I kind of hate to put everything in "Service Providers" and "Middleware" and whatnot.

E. g. before, you had a folder "app/controllers", now you have "app/Http/Controllers" and "app/Http/Middleware" and "app/Http/Requests". While this might make sense for bigger projects, it also loses a bit of its lightweight charm.

With Laravel 4, things seemed to be more straight forward.

chrisan• 11 years ago

Laravel changes.. er.. updates a lot more often

lukeholder3• 11 years ago

Highly active community with awesome mentors like Jeffery Way (laracasts.com).

noir_lord• 11 years ago

Over cake, it's modern, widely used and supported.

Over Symfony, not a lot tbh (large parts of Laravel are built on Symfony), it's a lot more opinionated out the box than Symfony and Eloquent has a flatter learning curve than Doctrine.

acomjean• 11 years ago

So having looked into php frameworks a bit.

There are 2 main packages of reusable components in php. Symfony and Zend.

Somewhat confusingly Zend and Symfony also make frameworks built on top of these components. But you can use the components on their own. Use the Composer to install the ones you need. You don't even need a framework to use them.

Laravel is built on top of Symfony components.

I think the main advantage to Laravel is people who use it really tend to like it... a lot. I hear a lot of complaining about other frameworks, but Laravel people enjoy. People that figure it out tend to get sites up really quickly. The main downside I hear about is performance.

For me documentation is key. I tried using Zend components, and while they worked I find the documentation really lacking. Zend have some great stuff like an api builder, but documentation is really important and its why I'll probably end up trying Laravel

Ronsenshi4• 11 years ago

As some other commenters wrote - there's not that many differences with Symfony approach-wise. But it's more fun to write code in Laravel, Symfony on the other hand is incredibly verbose which is not a good thing in my opinion. You have to write way more code to achieve same thing in Symfony compared to Laravel.

Laravel has very reasonable and easy to understand structure and you don't need to use .xml or .yml for configuration.

I've had experience in CodeIgniter, Symfony, FuelPHP and I've been sticking with Laravel for over two years because of how simply nice it is to work with.

tapsboy2• 11 years ago

Having worked with Kohana, CodeIgniter and WP, Laravel is the reason I started writing PHP again. Also being a node developer, Laravel feels at home with Express(both influenced by Sinatra).

Artisan command line utility, Migrations for DB version control, Blade template engine and the neat directory structure are some of the things I like apart from the community ofcourse

ponyous2• 11 years ago

What is the thing you don't like about Laravel community? (or is this what you say when other PHP devs are involved?)

dieg0• 11 years ago

Awesome news, been expecting this since a mysterious twit last week, Laravel is awesome, can't wait to check v5

thanks!

gude• 11 years ago

Laracasts has a series of introductory screencasts on Laravel 5: https://laracasts.com/series/laravel-5-fundamentals

lukeholder3• 11 years ago

Laravel represents what modern PHP can do and be. Clean, organised, fully object-oriented. Kudos to what Taylor Otwell has created both from a marketing perspective and technical standpoint.

deweller• 11 years ago

I was a little scared by the heavy use of static method calls in Laravel 4. L5 has made the statics easier to ignore if that is not your thing.

But after understanding the Facade pattern that is widely used by the framework, I've concluded that the use of the static method calls is not an antipattern at all.

raziel2p5• 11 years ago

It really is less of an antipattern in PHP than other languages. With every request being its own process you don't have to worry about singletons as much, and as long as it's easy to swap with mocks/fakes/whatever it's all good.

coldtea3• 11 years ago

Laravel represents what modern PHP can do and be. Clean, organised, fully object-oriented.

In a JavaEE circa 2003-5 way. Not exactly what modern programming is about...

cbg0• 11 years ago

We got it the first time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8997114

EugeneOZ• 11 years ago

Laravel is the shame of modern PHP - ZERO OOP, almost all methods are static, no DI, array-oriented programming everywhere, a lot of hardcoded "new" (so you can't mock and test).

leftnode• 11 years ago

I'm a fan of Symfony but love that there are several advanced frameworks pushing the state of the art forward (Symfony, Laravel, ZF2).

whatsthatyousay• 11 years ago

Ive been so excited about this! Though I kinda miss the call to action buttons that they had on the old site. Scrolled down the page looking for the quickstart button before I had a "duh" moment and clicked on documentation.

rdoherty• 11 years ago

After using Laravel 4 for an internal company tool I have a hard time recommending it (sadly, I was hopeful). I found the docs to be uneven in quality/scope, some key features (mostly around the ORM) missing and the 'feel' to be slightly off.

It's hard to quantify, but I have used CakePHP, Yii, Rails (0.9 through 4), Django and plenty of home-grown 'frameworks'. From all those the most cohesive and understandable to me was Rails followed by Yii (surprisingly).

Maybe it's the docs or structure, but Rails and Yii have a strong opinion and it seems their developers have both CS smarts and industry experience, which shows in the structure and code.

I'm sure in time Laravel will mature and improve. Currently it just feels like there's a lot more hype than it merits.

mediascreen4• 11 years ago

Maybe it's a matter of taste?

I have worked with Symfony2, Zend Framework, Yii, Kohana and Laravel and find Laravel the most intuitive to work with.

I like that you can start using it for very rapid prototyping and refactor into more complicated structures as the application grows.

gerardnll2• 11 years ago

Totally agree. I think that Symfony2 is a pain in the ass. Laravel lets you have something working really fast. Then you can improve the code later on.

debaserab24• 11 years ago

I don't see how Laravel lends itself to "rapid prototyping" than any other framework. Sure, Symfony2 or ZF2 has best practices on how to do things, but at the end of the day it's just MVC - you can skip any best practice you want to just get something done. This isn't unique to Laravel.

raziel2p5• 11 years ago

It strikes me as a project that should've been an internal framework, not a public one. Too many things break and change constantly. Rapid release cycles is a good thing for smaller libraries with specific tasks, but I expect a framework to remain largely unchanged (except bugfixes, of course) for longer periods of time.

Unless Taylor gives away control of the project, I don't see it happening. It'll keep being a popular framework, though.

josegonzalez2• 11 years ago

As a Core developer of CakePHP, I'll tell you that the community at large loves major releases more than they like stability. Something about using the newest toy really gets a lot of people going. We actually have had quite a few developers tell us our framework is dead, despite ongoing development on a new major release and monthly minor/patch releases for the current stable line for 3+ years.

I can't comment on Laravel though, as my only experience with it was a negative one. I had a rejected bugfix for which Taylor decided to ignore the PHP documentation I linked to verifying the issue, and several other developers saying they have experienced the issue/would like to see my PR merged in.

I think it'll stay a popular PHP framework until the next popular framework comes around (CI => FuelPHP => Laravel).

Ronsenshi4• 11 years ago

What could be those ORM features that you're missing? I've been working with Laravel 4 since before it had documentation when I had to go through all of the code to understand how it works and I know that besides what is described in documentation - there's a number of features that are available, but not listed.

raziel2p5• 11 years ago

Joining and querying efficiently on relations is probably the most obvious omission.

dubcanada• 11 years ago

I am going to have to completely disagree with you. I have been using it for several years now and I have nothing but good things to say about it.

The ORM is basic yes, but that's the purpose of it. If you want a bigger one do what you do with Symfony and use Doctrine or something more robust.

kowdermeister• 11 years ago

I just tried to two days ago and did a complete project with it. Auth, CRUD, file management, etc. It's an instant love for me. Docs is mostly ok, Google provides instant answers. I'm happy to ditch CodeIgniter for this.

mcmillion• 11 years ago

I tend to use Laravel when the client/project forces me to use PHP rather than Rails. It's not bad when coming from the Rails world.

I also have a bit of pride that it's made in Arkansas. Yes, we have computers and the internet here.

ianhawes• 11 years ago

Having watched Laravel 5 throughout development, I'm personally unhappy with the fact that most of the nice features of Laravel have been removed.

For example, the default version of Laravel 4.x shipped with the "Whoops" PHP stack trace view, which is far superior to the L5-default Symfony stack trace view. Other features were removed too, including the HTML library. Blade tags were changed for no reason.

Overall, it feels like instead of adding requested features, Taylor decided to redesign the architecture for no reason.

raziel2p5• 11 years ago

The single maintainer just didn't want to maintain them, which goes to show how Laravel really just is his personal project that got really popular, not a community-driven effort.

ceejayoz4• 11 years ago

IMO, that fact has helped make Laravel successful. Sometimes, software projects benefit from a benevolent dictator rather than design-by-committee.

fideloper2• 11 years ago

FUD.

The "architecture" change is the bootstrap repository, which has a new folder structure. I know, scary stuff! Folders!

The "architecture" has some enhancements to middleware and fleshing out events/commands to a "command bus". Basically, you get more sugar on top of the (mostly) same architecture.

Whoops caused a lot of headaches behind the scenes, and did stupid things like convert ALL http error responses to 500, even on a 404 error (which showed up in Whoops, as HTTP errors are converted to exceptions within Symfony's HTTP stack).

Blade tags have one new tag, and the old ones still works.

This point might be the subjective one - HTML library. HTML libraries create an enormous amount of support for people's edge cases and generally are better pushed out as a third-party add on to suit your needs. The upgrade guide explains how you can add them back in if you want. https://github.com/illuminate/html

raziel2p5• 11 years ago

That's a shitty explanation for dropping Whoops. The first time I remember the discussion of it being dropped got brought up was because of a bug in the framework relating to the assets, where Taylor didn't hesitate to blame Whoops and deleted comments on Github pointing out that the problem was actually in his own code.

It would've been super easy to add some code that sets the HTTP code for Whoops's response if that was the problem - but the fact is you should demand your framework users define their own 404 handlers.

The old Blade tags now escape all HTML, that hardly counts as working.

gerardnll2• 11 years ago

HTML library is now optional, more info on that here also here you will find why the blade tags have changed: http://laravel.com/docs/5.0/upgrade#upgrade-5.0

Whoops stack trace: https://laracasts.com/discuss/channels/general-discussion/wh...

Can we stop complaining? I see a ton of improvements and nicer features than the ones you are talking about in this new release.

mmccaff• 11 years ago

I don't know the reasoning behind the decision to not use Whoops by default, but I considered the beautiful and informative error pages to be a nice trait of Laravel that I will miss. It is also a feature that almost anyone who has used Laravel has come in contact with, so I am sure that it will be widely missed. I remember a non-developer coworker who was using Laravel 4.x for the first time commenting on how it was one of their favorite features.

Adding it back should be trivial http://mattstauffer.co/blog/bringing-whoops-back-to-laravel-...

I usually add the Raven PHP client [https://github.com/getsentry/raven-php] to report errors to Sentry when starting a new project and will likely do the same with Whoops by default.

import• 11 years ago

Bad to see, Laravel still doesn't have an LTS version. Upgrading is a pain.

ceejayoz4• 11 years ago

Might be a business opportunity, ala https://railslts.com/.

iN7h33nD2• 11 years ago

I really like Laravel, it makes getting things started easier. I am glad I finally have a good way to manage my assets from within Laravel so that I don't have to deal with all of that myself every time. The only thing I find Laravel lacking is Web Socket support and every time I tried to implement something I would basically give up and switch to Node.js. Is there anything that can get web sockets working in Laravel?

debaserab24• 11 years ago

Deal-breakers for me with Laravel:

- Blade templating language. I don't need yet another templating syntax to learn, especially one that isn't analogous to others I know and are common among other frameworks.

- I really can't imagine going back to an active record based ORM. I've learned too many hard performance lessons from Doctrine1 and rails at this point.

- Facade/proxy pattern based classes. I think as they are implemented in the actual framework, these are done correctly. However, I think the userland understanding of this pattern is often lacking and leads to a lot of glorified singletons that are some how touted as acceptable because they call them facade/proxy based.

In the giant lineup of frameworks, ranging from something as simple as SlimPHP or silex, all the way to enterprise targeted frameworks like Zend Framework 2, I just don't see why I'd ever pick Laravel as the go-to solution in any use case.

JonoBB• 11 years ago

Those don't have to be deal-breakers.

- You don't have to use Blade. Use Twig or Smarty or whatever you want

- You don't have to use Eloquent. Use raw queries or Doctrine or whatever you want

- You don't have to use Facades - use the IOC container to get whatever you want

Its so easy to plug-and-play with composer, and there are so many other features to laravel.

debaserab24• 11 years ago

Yeah, at that point why use Laravel?

All the major frameworks are just as decoupled, but as soon as you start selecting off the "native" defaults for things like templating and ORM you lose integration features that have been built into other areas of the framework to support that specific library.

aikah• 11 years ago

what the point of it then? just use Silex,it's better,faster and simpler.

vatotemking• 11 years ago

i dont want to depend on a framework by one person.

Laravel 5 released

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