With CACI Digital Experience the UK’s first official Laravel partner since 2012, it’s been an unprecedently exciting few months in the Laravel community with one new development after the next. So, what's been happening and what do people with existing or potential Laravel projects need to know? This article investigates.
An investment boost for Laravel
The first big sign of change came in September 2024, when Laravel founder Taylor Otwell announced a $57 million Series A investment boost from venture capitalist technology specialists, Accel. There’s always suspicion around what ‘big tech’ investment can mean for an Open-Source platform’s ‘soul’ but Accel has a long Open-Source heritage working with Sentry and Cloudera and recently signed the Open-Source Pledge championing the value of Open-Source community. And events since the September announcement signal many reasons for enthusiasm.
Courtesy of the Laravel community blog
Taylor is still in place as CEO with a clear vision to create a holistic Laravel full-stack web application experience that integrates hosting, scaling, and improving applications within the Laravel ecosystem, rather using downstream services that increase complexity and costs. Effectively, as he summarised at this Laracon US 2024 keynote, a Laravel framework that can go “from hello world to hello web in under a minute”.
The Laravel engineering team has tripled in size and additional support hired for Open-Source development. All testament to Laravel's potential to scale operations, enhance product offerings and develop new tools benefitting developers and businesses alike.
Why the Laravel framework is so popular for web applications
Laravel's star status is undeniable. It’s one of the most widely used PHP frameworks (PHP accounts for around 75% of the web), powering over 1.7 million websites globally, including the market-leading Square ecommerce platform. Its elegant syntax, comprehensive documentation, vibrant community and commitment to continuous improvement means businesses can rely on Laravel for robust, scalable and secure web applications that are at the forefront of web development technologies.
With the new investment, the first signs of realising Taylor Otwell’s ambitious future vision for the framework and boost the current growth trajectory are already here.
Courtesy of Laravel YouTube channel
Developer-friendly tools and innovations – Laravel Cloud and Nightwatch
One of the most exciting developments is the launch of Laravel Cloud, unveiled at Laracon US in August 2024. This fully managed infrastructure platform is designed to simplify the deployment and scaling of Laravel applications. With features like auto-scaling, DDoS protection, and serverless databases, Laravel Cloud aims to eliminate the complexities of DevOps, allowing developers to focus on building great applications. Many brands will be looking at whether to do a Laravel Cloud migration by moving their infrastructure from existing cloud platforms to Laravel Cloud. We propose careful planning and risk management in this instance.
Another new product is Laravel Nightwatch - a monitoring and performance platform tailored to Laravel to keep your application ahead of the game in terms of availability, reliability, and speed. With end users perceiving web app load times 15% slower than they actually are and laggy apps negatively impacting conversion rates, abandonment and brand perception, this new tool puts Laravel on the front foot to ensure high performance.
Courtesy of the Laravel community blog
Frontend-Friendly – Inertia.js 2.0 improves user experience
Particularly welcome news to us as a Laravel development agency grounded in user-centred design thinking, was the launch of Inertia.js 2.0, announced on the Laravel blog in December 2024 - a step change for frontend development with Laravel.
Key enhancements include Asynchronous Requests allowing multiple requests to happen simultaneously without cancelling each other out, so even if there are background data updates or form submissions, the user experience remains fluid. Deferred Props lets non-critical data load after the initial page render, improving Core Web Vitals’ performance metrics (critical for Google SEO performance) as well as making the app more carbon-friendly.
Another UX and performance improvement comes from Prefetching, pre-loading data in the background for pages likely to be visited next in a user journey, making them load instantly when accessed. Together, these powerful features from the update make applications faster, more user, CRO and SEO-friendly.
A user-friendly future for Laravel needs a user-centred agency
It’s very clear the investment and the rapid launches indicate a sustainable, super-charged Laravel ecosystem boasting faster development cycles, greater Open-Source innovation and user-friendliness. There’s a palpable sense of excitement that the framework can be the ultimate tool for powerful applications that can do anything a business requires it to and keep pace with all the latest tech trends whether AI or immersive technology.
But as we know from our decades’ experience renewing Laravel projects or building Laravel apps that can deliver on strategic and evolving business needs over time, having powerful technical tools – like those we’ve seen emerge since the Accel investment - at your developers’ disposal isn’t enough to deliver the kind of powerful digital experiences that users today demand.
As we write about in our Laravel white paper (with a foreword from Taylor Otwell himself!) being able to fully leverage the framework’s power for businesses requires a truly holistic approach to Laravel development incorporating effective product management, Service and UX design, accessibility expertise, product and project design capabilities, platform engineering and maintenance skills and much more besides. So, if you want to supercharge your current Laravel application and or want to harness the emerging power of Laravel for a new one, do get in touch so we can discuss your ambitions today.
