New Features of Laravel 9 – A Comprehensive Study & Analysis

Laravel is an open-source, free PHP network that was first released in 2011. Due to its stability, sophistication, and scalability, it is now a hot favorite among PHP developers and PHP development companies. Now Laravel 9 is released with New Features and Stability.

What’s new in Laravel 9.0?

Normally, Laravel releases new updates every 6 months which has drawn plenty of criticism and generated ample confusion in people’s minds. Many have questioned the reason for these constant updates. Laravel v9 was supposed to be released around September 2021 but the release was postponed. Finally, Laravel v9 is expected to come out in January 2022.

As a business owner who takes on projects requiring Laravel development services, you will be curious to know how the new update will affect you and what value addition will it bring to your business.

Users of Laravel 8 can now take advantage of parallel testing, a feature that was newly introduced on 25th January 2021. The practice of releasing regular updates every six months will now be discontinued and new updates will only be released once a year.

This newly adopted practice will lighten the burden on the Laravel community and creators. Additionally, the makers of Laravel will also be able to introduce top-notch features with greater stability without compromising on backward compatibility. Users, developers, and businesses will immensely benefit from these new practices.

Want to know more about these newly introduced changes? Refer to Laravel’s support policy documentation which is available on their official website.

Salient Features of the Current Laravel Version

1. Eloquent ORM

Laravel’s existing framework provides an eloquent ORM or object-relational mapping. This feature allows developers to resolve database queries with PHP syntax rather than writing SQL code which can be a tedious task. Out of all the PHP frameworks in the market, ORM is the fastest. Thanks to this feature, Laravel is able to store in-memory object data in relational databases.

2. Artisan CLI

Another crucial aspect of Laravel is Artisan SLI which enables you to create or modify any part of Laravel through the command line. The best part is that it does not require you to painfully navigate through thousands of files or folders.

Moreover, you can also interact with your database directly through your command line using Laravel Tinker. There is no need to install a database client.

3. MVC Architecture

The Laravel framework implements MVC architecture which greatly improves the language’s relatability and adaptability plus it follows prevailing web development practices & patterns while making constant improvements.

It is impossible to work with Laravel without grasping the essentials of the MVC architectural pattern which is also the foundation of other frameworks like AdonisJS from Javascript and ASP.net MVC from C#.

4. Automatic pagination

Only those plagued by paginations while developing apps will understand the value of built-in frameworks that aid in the implementation of fully functional pagination.

How does Laravel resolve the pagination issue? – through automatic pagination. One of the topmost reasons for Laravel’s popularity is the automatic pagination feature which greatly reduces a developer’s time & effort.

5. Security

Do you analyze the security features of any web development app that you intend to use? You need to thoroughly understand the security measures, and potential risks without proper investigation of these aspects your site is vulnerable to hacking attacks. Also, you will lose time and money which will be lost forever.

Laravel follows the OWASP security principles due to which it has robust security features. These security features are powerful enough to handle threats like cross-site forgery requests to SQL injection.

Expected New Features in Laravel 9

1. Minimum PHP requirements

Laravel v9 will require the current PHP 8 and PHPUnit 8 for testing purposes. Why is that? The reason is that Laravel would employ the latest Symphony v6.0 which also requires PHP 8. Right from JIT compile to constructor property promotion, PHP 8 is a major update with notable improvements. Upgrade to PHP 8 if you have not done it yet.

2. Anonymous stub migration

With Laravel 9, you can set anonymous stub migration as the default behavior while running the popular migration command. This valuable feature came out with the release of Laravel 8.37, which aimed to solve the GitHub issue.

What is this issue? When you create a database from scratch, numerous migrations with the same class name can create problems. With the anonymous stub migration feature, issues related to class name collisions are eradicated instantly.

Since the release of Laravel 8.37, the frameworks have supported anonymous class migration files. With Laravel 9, the same would become the default behavior.

3. New Query Builder Interface

With the release of Laravel 9, type hinting will become greatly dependable for refactoring, static analysis, plus code completion in their IDEs. The reason for this is the absence of a shared interface/inheritance between Query/Builder, Eloquent/Builder, and Eloquent/Relation. Furthermore. Laravel 9 will help developers use the new query builder interface for type hinting, refactoring, and static analysis.

4. PHP 8 String Functions

As of now, Laravel is targeting PHP 8.0 as the minimum version. Hence, we can use the latest new str_contains(), str_starts_with() and str_ends_with() functions internally in the IlluminateSupportStr class.

All of Laravel 9’s new features mentioned above give us a rough idea of what the finished product will look like. We can surely expect plenty of bugs, fixes and enormous changes.

How to Install Laravel 9

For development and testing purposes, you can easily install and run Laravel 9 on your local device. As stated above, Laravel supports PHP v8 engine only. Check your current PHP version before installation and testing. To simplify matters, get rid of the existing version and begin a fresh install.

With the command mentioned above, you can create a new Laravel project while naming it laravel-9-dev, using the latest Laravel 9 which is still under development. To install, run;

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

Another method to use is to use the Laravel Global CLI to create a new Laravel project. Next, proceed to create a fresh project from the dev branch.

Enter the command below to create a new Laravel project.

laravel new laravel-9-dev --dev

After you finish installing Laravel 9, enter the new directory (laravel-dev), and run the artisan command to check the current version.

cd laravel-9-dev
php artisan --version

A must-read: Laravel vs WordPress: Which is Better For Your Next Web Project?

Final Thoughts

Laravel 9’s new features sound promising and the buzzword is that it will exceed developer and company owner’s expectations. Have we included all the features that Laravel v9 will come out with? Absolutely not, we have only hit the tip of the iceberg. Many of the features are still a mystery because they have not been announced yet.

Remember this blog because we will review Laravel v9 after it is out. Meanwhile, if you require a Laravel Development Company in India, you know where to look and who to call. What are your expectations from Laravel 9 and how do you think it will perform? Share your thoughts, we would love to hear them.