What New Laravel 8 Has To Serve Laravel Development Services? Is This a Better Version?

Laravel team comes with their new efforts and major changes every six-month. Laravel 8 is such a new thing that has given the developers a new realm of development. They have hosted an online event ‘Laracon Online’ to announce their new release with ultimate features and performance.            

On 8th September 2020, Laravel 8 came into existence. With 6 months of bug fixes until 8th March 2021 and one-year security fixes until 8th September 2021, Laravel 8 is all set to create new dimensions for Laravel Development Services. This new release includes brand new scaffolding, time-travelling, class-based model factories, and much more. We need to review almost every relevant thing of Laravel 8 to explore more with every development.

Before delving into the specifications of Laravel 8, we need to take an overview of improvements. There were maintenance mode, route caching, and rate-limiting like features in the previous versions of Laravel. All these have come in Laravel 8 too but with enhancements. Laravel Jetstream, New Model directory, Job Batching, Schema Dump, and many other enhancements are making this version unique and special.

Now business needs to notice new things before moving to hire Laravel developer for their required development. Here is a list of new and excellent features that we are going to enjoy in this new version –

Job Batching

Being a Laravel Development Company, we need to notify every change (or improvement) of Laravel 8, significantly. But we have found Laravel’s job batching feature as the most notable and exciting improvement to be mentioned first.

The developers can now use ‘Bus::batch()’ to pass all the jobs and wait for the response. That upcoming response will tell you the statistics of the dispatched job. This feature will enable the developers to dispatch multiple jobs to the queue. The performance takes place at one time to be processed simultaneously. This can be marked as ‘queued job posting’ where callbacks take place when all the jobs of the queue are finished.

‘then()’, ‘catch()’ and ‘finally()’ are three callbacks that are available with Laravel 8 to perform as per their individual requirement. Many other advanced features are also here like the ability of adding other jobs to an existing batch from within a job. ‘$this->batch()’ helper is used to performing this job.     

Laravel Jetstream

Laravel 8 is coming with new application scaffolding, namely Laravel Jetstream. This is an open-source platform that is available for free. It gives a better starting point to developers for their new projects. Laravel Jetstream, somehow, replaces the legacy Laravel authentication UI, which was available for previous versions of Laravel.

The use of Tailwind CSS in Jetstream takes Laravel 8 to another level. The developers can choose between the Inertia.js and Livewire. Laravel Jetstream includes some built-in features like API tokens, Two-factor Authentication, User Profile Management, Team Management, and much more. Since it gives beautiful scaffolding for the Laravel application, much cool stuff is there to be optimized.

Models Directory/Default App

Laravel 8 has shipped an ‘app/models’ directory. A poll was running on Twitter asking the developers for their comfort to choose between the use of ‘app/’ directory and ‘app/Models’ folder. The majority chose ‘app/models’ and got that too.

Now Laravel Development Services got a great opportunity of creating a new model with the ‘PHP artisan make: model SomeModel’ command. This command will put the new model in the ‘app/Model’ directory.

With the default Model Directory, Laravel 8 brings an organized way of working. In the previous versions, when the models were in-app directory, these things were indeed a mess.  

Model Factory

The inclusion of model factories features has given complete new looks to Laravel and set Laravel 8 apart. This is such a powerful and incredible tool to make the work easier. Developers will have a factory class for each model and thus, it can be said that Laravel 8 is now a class-based Laravel.

A new ‘HasFactory’ trait will provide a ‘factory()’ method on your model classes. This will return an instance of the factory class. ‘create()’ or ‘make()’ call methods will perform as expected. You can also notice the improvements to factory states as, now, you can create your own custom methods, right on the factory class. It further includes a separate official package ‘laravel/legacy-factories’ to support the old format. Developers can use old and new factories at the same time with this package.

Schema Dump

Developers are enjoying this new feature of Laravel 8 which they can use easily with ‘Laravel Voyager’. This is, basically, a new artisan command to be used for generating a schema file in the ‘database/schema’ directory. ‘PHP artisan schema: dump’ is the command to be used for the basic structure of the whole database.

Additionally, ‘PHP artisan schema: dump –prune’ will generate a single schema dump file after removing all the old migration. One can dump the current database schema and then prune all existing migrations. ‘schema: dump’ will help you to update the things when you reach a certain number of migration folders.

Enhanced Rate Limits  

In Laravel 8, the rate limit has been defined with more flexibility. Along with the same, it is compatible with the throttle middleware API’s previous releases. The new ‘RateLimiter’ façade helps the developers in giving them a name and closure for returning the details of the limit.

This function is easy-to-use for APIs. Here, developers can limit the number of users and manage how many send requests per minute or so. Maximum 50 requests per minute are allowed for the login page. The developers can also create segments by taking any piece of data into consideration, like IP address, per user ID, and many more.

Improved Maintenance Mode     

Laravel 8 is coming with pretty improvements in the Maintenance Mode with the ‘PHP artisan down’ command. In previous versions, ‘artisan down’ and ‘artisan up’ commands were putting the site into maintenance mode. But when it comes to giving access to a few people, the only possible way was to do it with IT whitelisting. On the other hand, IT whitelisting gets failed with many users and dynamic IP addresses. The improvement in Maintenance mode was indeed required and Laravel 8 is coming with the change.

A ‘secret’ flag is going to help you with your site when it is in maintenance mode. This flag becomes a route when your site relies on maintenance mode. You may refer to this as a secret bypass. A developer can set more into the maintenance mode option with more commands.

Final words

Since Laravel keeps introducing new features in every version, you need to be very careful about moving to hire Laravel developers. A Laravel developer or team should be skilled to evolve with the latest technological adaptation. Laravel 8 is looking fantastic in its quick glimpse. WebOccult has gone through its newly introduced features to ensure clients with better conviction. Just choose a Laravel Development Company which can play with every new feature and turn them well for your targeted achievements!