Laravel 4: The day is here

Today is the day. In a few hours, Laravel 4.0 will see the light of the day.

What a huge day for the Laravel community and the PHP community at large! Laravel 3 was awesome, but version 4 is so much better. It has the same ease of use, pretty much the same syntax and tons of new features, some of which I will write about in the coming days.

But the best new feature is clearly under the hood, which means it will sadly go largely unnoticed: it is the fact that the framework was implemented completely from scratch, with a largely superior architecture. Not only is the code now much more testable and thoroughly unit-tested, it is decoupled in such a way that you can use the 27 (!) components on their own, thanks to Composer! This is where Taylor has really outdone himself. It’s a piece of art.

And last but not least, Laravel 4 tries to encourage developers to use best practices like dependency injection. Sometimes, the shortest code isn’t the best one, and the framework puts some tools in your hand that help you write better object-oriented code.

Now it’s time to celebrate. (Happy Birthday, Taylor!) Have fun using this version! Or trying it out if you haven’t yet. It will change the way you do PHP.