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Discussion on: Laravel News: Laravel 12 Released

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xwero profile image
david duymelinck • Edited

Upgrade today and take advantage of Laravel’s latest enhancements!

The enhancements in the Laravel framework already were in Laravel 11 versions. Which makes changing to the major version for the framework more marketing than anything else.

Ongoing feature releases will continue throughout the year without breaking changes.

It feels like the living standard for HTML. Juist skip the semantic versioning, and use build numbers. The biggest breaking change is going from 11 to 12 in the composer file according to the update guide.

Laravel 12 continues to require PHP 8.2 as the minimum version. This aligns with modern PHP improvements and ensures better performance and security.

Check the end of life of php. 8.2 is on security support until 2027.
There are only a few breaking changes in php 8.3. So it wouldn't be that hard to update to an active supported version.
Making the php version higher would warrant a new major version, because it is the biggest dependency.

I wonder in these AI times do we still need starterkits? Starterkits are a bunch of compromises put together to get started faster. Why not tell an AI to create the starter based on the requirements of the project and have a tailor-made starter

While I think Laravel is a good thing in the PHP community, It starts to feel the environment projects are beginning to take over the framework.

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ehtesham_ali_abc367f36a5b profile image
Ehtesham Ali

You bring up great points about Laravel’s versioning and its evolving role in the PHP ecosystem. The shift to continuous updates makes major version upgrades feel more incremental, with Laravel 12 primarily aligning with PHP 8.2 for security and performance. AI-driven starter kits could be the future, but community-supported ones still offer a solid, best-practice foundation for many teams.

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xwero profile image
david duymelinck

All starterkits they provide feel more javascript centric than PHP centric.
Nowadays even javascript frameworks like astro and remix are moving away from building the full UI in the browser and focus on progressive enhancement. The last term is something that first popped up not long after ajax was introduced.
The focus with Inertia is on SPA while the javascript community is moving away from it. While I think Inertia does a lot for developer experience, it sustains a dying concept.

I have nothing against utility classes, but Tailwind takes it to the extreme. And then another UI framework on top, all just to generate css? If that isn't over-engineering, I don't know what is.

I think the time it takes to select a starterkit and configure it for a project, is going to take longer than thinking about what you need for a project with a team, making AI spit out code, and checking it. Because it is project based it is possible to go further than any starterkit can.