Laravel 5 released

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Agreed. Definitely worth paying for.

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.

>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...

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Seems to be working fine here. Try again?

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.

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.

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

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.