First Thoughts – Laravel Framework 6.0

At Wolf Logic we’re big fans of the Laravel framework for building web apps. Is this release just a series of bug fixes or a major incremental release with some great new features? Lets take a look at the key points of note. Here you go…

Laravel UI

The frontend scaffolding provided with Laravel 5.x releases is now extracted into a separate UI Composer package. This allows first-party UI scaffolding to be iterated on separately from the primary framework.

Ignition Error Page

Laravel 6.0 now ships with Ignition – a new open-source exception page – created by Freek Van der Herten and Marcel Pociot. To learn more about this feature, check out our announcement post, and see it in action in Laracasts’ What’s New in Laravel 6: Ignition is the Amazing New Error Page video.
PHP 7.1 will no longer be actively maintained as of December 2019. Therefore, Laravel 6.0 requires PHP 7.2 or greater.

Improved Exceptions Via Ignition

Ignition, a new open source exception detail page created by Freek Van der Herten and Marcel Pociot. Ignition offers many benefits over previous releases, such as improved Blade error file and line number handling, runable solutions for common problems, code editing, exception sharing, and an improved UX.

Semantic Versioning

The Laravel release notes clarify semantic versioning going forward in 6.0 and beyond:

The Laravel framework package now follows the semantic versioning standard. This makes the framework consistent with the other first-party packages which already followed this versioning standard. The Laravel release cycle will remain unchanged.

Improved Authorization Responses

Previously it was difficult to provide custom error messages around authorisation to end users. Laravel 6 introduces a Gate::inspect method.

Job Middleware

Job middleware was implemented by Taylor Otwell.

Job middleware allows you to wrap custom logic around the execution of queued jobs, reducing boilerplate in the jobs themselves. For example, in previous releases, you may have wrapped the logic of a job’s handle method within a rate-limited callback.

Laravel Lazy Collections

Lazy collections were implemented by Joseph Silber.

Many developers already enjoy the powerful Collection methods available within the framework. To supplement the already powerful Collection class, 6.0 introduces a LazyCollection, which leverages PHP’s generators to allow you to work with very large data sets while keeping memory usage low.

Curious to find out how your business can utilise this powerful and diverse platform? Get in touch to find out how.