Seb Armand told some battle stories of how they have approached scaling Laravel at Square, one of the largest payment processors.
Reducing database load: eager-loading queries, using Elasticache, developing Tag Tree Cache to cache multiple levels and recursively flush the relevant caches
Reducing bandwidth: using CDNs to move assets closer to end users
Reducing processing: using queues and deduplication
Further reducing processing: using batches and pipelines, and buffering/bundling tasks together
Caleb’s talk began with an unfortunate 30-minute delay caused by technical difficulties. He and Aaron Francis spent a bit of time entertaining the audience, and then Caleb took questions and answers from the audience until the equipment was ready.
He announced Flux, the official Livewire component library.
Under the hood, it uses a lot of web components, and everything he showed looked very well-designed and thought out.
I’m slightly hesitant to jump in and start using it, because I just recently spent not-insignificant time replacing another form component library that is no longer supported.
Because Caleb is charging money for this, I suspect it will remain a viable business and be supported longer than the open-source one I had used, but I still can’t bring myself to be as gung-ho about it as I’d like to be.
Taylor’s keynote is always the highlight of the conference, and this year was no exception.
Here’s the video; below are a few of the highlights and what I like about them.
First-Party VS Code Extension
Coming later this fall is a new VS Code Extension developed and maintained by Laravel.
It will offer autocomplete for a number of features (config and env values, app services, translations, views, Inertia props, and Eloquent), along with click-through links and preview-on-hover.
Probably my favorite feature is the Test Explorer integration: whether you’re using PHPUnit or Pest, your tests will show up in the sidebar, where you can run and see the status; you can also see test failure details in a “peek” UI widget.
This sounds like it will replace several of the extensions I currently use, and I’m excited to have first-party support for Laravel development in VS Code.
Container Attributes
A Container Attributes feature feels like dependency injection for config values or other attributes. This doesn’t seem like a huge feature, but will reduce some boilerplate code.
Chaperone Method
The just-released->chaperone() method helps prevent n+1 queries when you need to do something like retrieve authors with their posts and then access something on the author model for each post.
I know I’ve run into this before, doing something like this to prevent the n+1 queries: $authors->with('posts.author');
defer() helper and Cache::flexible()
This looks very promising. It’s a simple way to push some work to the background, running it after the server has responded to the incoming request. I can immediately think of several apps where I have a super-simple job just to run something asynchronously after a request, and this can replace those.
Some potential use cases are for sending analytics, notifying third-party services, or any other “fire-and-forget” interaction.
This also enables a new Cache::flexible() method, providing a stale-while-revalidate mechanism to reduce the number of requests that hit a cold cache.
You provide two TTL numbers to this method:
The standard TTL indicating how long the cached value is valid
A second TTL indicating how long it’s acceptable to provide the stale value, while refreshing the value in the background so it’s ready for the next request
I’m very excited for this, as it will help improve several pain points in a couple of current applications.
Concurrency Facade
If some code needs to run multiple slow processes that don’t depend on each other, the new Concurrency facade will be helpful.
Concurrency::run([]) can be used to run multiple requests/jobs/etc. in parallel, returning the values for subsequent use; or Concurrency::defer([]) can run multiple processes in parallel after the current request, using the new defer() helper.
Inertia 2.0
Most of my apps are Livewire, but these features look amazing and I’ll definitely be using them:
Async requests: currently, Inertia runs only one request at a time; this allows multiple requests
Polling: I’ve manually written polling in several different components, and this will simplify and standardize those
WhenVisible: this will wait to load props until the user scrolls to a portion of the page that needs them, and then it loads each prop as it needs. I’ve almost written some code to do this, but it seemed too complex for the benefit, so found another solution instead. Having this available as a first-party solution will add definite performance improvements.
Infinite scrolling: not anything I’ve needed yet, but might be useful at some point
Prefetching: this stands to improve performance by optimistically loading data so it’s ready as soon as a user visits another page
Deferred props: another strategy for improving performance by waiting to load specific props until after the initial page has been rendered
Laravel Cloud
The big announcement: Laravel Cloud is a fully-managed infrastructure platform built specifically for hosting Laravel apps as simply as possible.
Taylor demonstrated the process of adding a new application, providing a repository, and deploying, all within 25 seconds!
It provides scalability both up and down; when not in use, it can be set to hibernate to save costs.
It allows you to create deployments from different branches, enabling an easy way to preview code in different branches before going live. (This is maybe my favorite feature.)
In the talk, he mentioned PostgreSQL as a serverless database option; later in a podcast interview with Matt Stauffer, he mentioned that MySQL is in the works for launch, but wasn’t quite complete in time for the talk.
Laravel Cloud will support creating multiple worker instances (separate from web instances) for handling queues.
It will provide SSL certificates and firewall using Cloudflare. He didn’t mention it in the talk, but in the podcast he did mention that Laravel Cloud runs on AWS, and another conference attendee said that Taylor told him it used Kubernetes.
Costs and Features
For sandbox:
No monthly fee
Compute: less than 1¢ per hour
Serverless Postgres: from 4¢ per hour plus 75¢ per GB
laravel.cloud domains included free
For production:
Costs not announced
Auto-scaling compute
Larger instance sizes
Custom domains included
Observability and debugging: wait until Laracon Australia!
Overall, Laravel Cloud seems like it dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for new developers, side projects, or anyone or any project that just wants to get something up and running with a low barrier to entry. I’m excited to see how this is going to change the ecosystem, as it makes it easier for people to focus on just building and shipping software.
If you find yourself writing PHP code containing other languages (JS snippets, SQL queries, etc.), you can use PHP’s Heredoc syntax for improved syntax highlighting, at least in VS Code.
Basically, Heredoc syntax uses <<< to note the beginning of a string, followed by an identifier. Everything until the next instance of that identifier is treated as a string.
Here are examples:
inline javascript codeheredoc syntax
You may not get autocompletion and other IDE features, but at least it’s easier to read.
What you choose for the identifier does impact the syntax highlighting…for example, if I had used SQL instead of JS in the example above, the code would have been highlighted differently. I suspect this is a feature of ProseMirror, though I haven’t dug into it to find out for sure.
Daniel Coulbourne presented a very enlightening talk about Verbs, an event sourcing package that has been in the works for a while.
Earlier in the day, he and John Rudolph Drexler were walking around the conference with a ziploc bag containing $1,500 cash, signing up people to play their pyramid scheme game: the more people you recruited, the more votes you received.
During the talk, Daniel showed the leaderboard on screen and realized that at least two players had entered a single bonus code multiple times, gaining extra votes. He then merged a PR fixing the bug for future entries.
However, in a “normal” app storing the current state for each user, you would be hard-pressed to figure out how to remove the illegitimate points, while retaining legitimate ones.
That’s the beauty of event sourcing: since each vote and bonus code was stored an event, he was able to wipe out the database and re-run the events to determine the correct vote tallies.
(And of course, since he was doing this live, he accidentally wiped out the migrations table too and had to restore it…)
Once he re-processed the events, the leaderboard showed correct results, removing the extra votes from those users.
This was a powerful example of how event sourcing can be to prevent, catch, or clean up from certain types of bugs.
His agency, thunk.dev, also wrote up this blog post about the game overall.
Colin DeCarlo presented two AI-integrated applications that Vehikl recently built.
He went into some background about how LLMs work under the hood converting text to embeddings, and how to use embeddings in an Laravel app.
Documentation Helper
ai.vehikl.com is a documentation helper that Vehikl built for Laracon 2023, trained on Laravel, Vue, and Winter documentation.
They configured the LLM queries with a temperature of 0, instructing the model to not make up information when it doesn’t know the answer.
Chatbot
They also recently created a chat app providing a custom tools for the AI to use:
The app has an API integration with a weather API
When handling a chat request about the weather for an activity this evening, the app passes the user’s message to ChatGPT, along with a list of custom tools the app provides
ChatGPT interprets the request, realizes that it needs a custom tool to get the weather data, and then responds to the app with the name of the tool and the parameters to pass to it
The app calls the weather service, then returns that data back to ChatGPT along with a request or correlation ID (I didn’t take good notes on this part)
ChatGPT interprets the weather data and then writes a more natural-language chat message to send back to the user
I haven’t dived into LLMs much yet, but this approach of using custom tools seems like a pretty nice way of integrating other, more programmatic services along with AI tools.
None of the apps I’m currently working on need this level of performance (yet) but I’d be interested to try Octane to see how it could improve performance even now.
One more note: Octane can run multiple processes concurrently to save time during a request:
<?php
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\DB;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Route;
use Laravel\Octane\Facades\Octane;
Route:: get('foo', function () {
Octane::concurrently([
fn () => DB::select('SELECT * WHERE SLEEP(1)'),
fn () => DB::select('SELECT * WHERE SLEEP(1)'),
fn () => DB::select('SELECT * WHERE SLEEP(1)'),
]);
return ['foo' => 'bar'];
});
Philo Hermans went deep into Livewire optimizations in his talk. A couple of key takeaways:
If your Livewire component calls an action that doesn’t need to re-render anything, you can skip re-rendering by using the [Renderless] attribute. I think I can find some immediate use cases for this.
For high-traffic apps with read replica databases, the sticky option can help guarantee consistency immediately after writes.
Optimistic UIs can improve perceived efficiency: use wire:loading.remove to immediately remove an element before the server round-trip has completed, so the app feels more snappy. I think I could also improve some UIs using this trick.
Luke Downing gave a great talk about lessons you can learn from the framework.
He took us line-by-line through routes/web.php (from the app structure prior to Laravel 11), explaining all the things you can learn from that file:
Authorization: the app has users, allows registration and login, etc. and uses one of the Laravel authentication starter kits
Model relationships: nested resource routes indicate that other models belong to users, and while the public can view models, only users can edit them
and more
I’ve found the routes files to be extremely helpful in my day-to-day development. In fact, I usually add the routes file as a pinned tab in VS Code so it’s always open (depending on the app, sometimes web.php, sometimes api.php, and sometimes both).
Some quotes from the talk:
Ordinary and obvious, not clever and convoluted.
The more obvious and clear your code is, the easier it is to spot and prevent bugs, and the simpler it is to come back to it later.
Know the rules and when to break them.
e.g., using facades for simpler testing, instead of the “right way” of dependency injection
In his talk, Nuno Maduro announced Pest v3, with several new features and no breaking changes.
I know this is pretty exciting to a lot of people, but personally I prefer PHPUnit for several reasons:
Better IDE support
e.g., in a Pest test, $this->assertDatabaseHas(…)runs without errors, but the IDE thinks it’s invalid because the test file doesn’t extend the base TestCase or inherit any of the parent methods
I personally like the discoverability of using a class, as my IDE will suggest available methods.
I do think there are some Pest helpers that I haven’t fully used, so those might help alleviate these gripes.
Yes, I know that Pest can be used as the test runner, and still use PHPUnit-style classes.
Improved VS Code test integration
This is the best VS Code extension I’ve found to work with tests in a PHP project. It shows all the tests along with pass/fail results in the sidebar, and I use the keyboard shortcut to run tests all the time.
The extension only works with PHPUnit tests, not Pest.
However, the upcoming first-party Laravel VS Code extension might change that…
These new features did catch my eye though:
Architecture presets: ensure your code follows best practices and conventions; read more here and see the plugin here
Mutation testing: let Pest modify parts of your code to ensure it causes failing tests, to ensure your tests are covering what you think they are; see the plugin here
I’ll be taking a look to see if I can use some of the underlying packages with PHPUnit.
All in all, seems like a solid upgrade, but it just doesn’t excite me all that much.
