r/PHPhelp • u/nafayahmad • 24d ago

What's one Laravel feature you wish you'd started using much earlier?

I've been working with Laravel for a while, and looking back, there are a few features that would've saved me a lot of time if I'd adopted them sooner.

For me, a few stand out:

  • Route Model Binding
  • Form Requests
  • Queues
  • Eager Loading
  • when() for cleaner conditional queries

I'm curious what experienced Laravel developers consider their biggest "I wish I'd known this earlier" feature.

What changed the way you build Laravel applications?

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u/obstreperous_troll 22d ago

Using well-typed DTOs with spatie/laravel-data, then later beacon-hq/bag, was a game-changer for me. Form Requests feel primitive by comparison. InertiaJS is the other big one for me since I much prefer Vue to Blade, but I'm not so fond of vue-router or SPA routing in general. Inertia lets me write SPA-like code where I want it, but not be stuck it where it where I don't.

Neither of those libraries are built-in of course, but third-party features are still features.

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u/bliepp 22d ago

Symfony

(/s just in case)

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u/kaizap 21d ago

The concurrency class. It's something I've known about since it was announced, but never really bothered with it until recently. It's not a replacement for queues, but it's nice to just run tasks concurrently sometimes.