As a developer, I am always on the lookout for the “cutting edge” in tech, languages, or frameworks. Most recently I have been following the Laravel framework news, which is a modern and user-friendly PHP framework that I love working in. Following the end of Laracon 2023 (Laravel’s annual convention) there were several big announcements. One of which is Laravel Herd, which allows for native Laravel/PHP development on macOS. Another big release is the announcement of Volt, which is a functional API allowing for single file PHP/HTML components.

Volt steps into the same space as Javascript frameworks like Vue, allowing rich interactivity that previous PHP front end components were lacking, while also allowing for rapid development. One of the most notable features of this are reactive properties, meaning that you can automatically refresh your data. I think this is a huge benefit both for development and debugging, meaning you don’t have to hunt a bug down between PHP and Javascript. You can view your logic and components within the same file!

Laravel Herd as previously mentioned is a new development environment written in SWIFT, specifically for Laravel/PHP development. Herd is able to perform 100% faster web requests and provides seamless migration from Valet, the previous environment for PHP development on macOS. Herd also allows you to manage multiple PHP versions without a headache (this is very nice). In addition, Herd also ships out of the box with Composer, the Laravel installer, Expose, and makes them available to your CLI automatically.

There were many other announcements made during this year’s Laracon. All of which are exciting and only seem to further Laravel’s place as the fastest and most user-friendly modern PHP development framework. Laravel continues to offer an ever-growing rich ecosystem to make software development more fun and interesting! It never gets stale working with Laravel, stay tuned for more updates!