LaraconEU 2024 Review

We are back from LaraconEU, which took place in Amsterdam on the 5th and 6th of February. The event was held at Muziekgebouw, an impressive concert hall with unique architecture and a beautiful sea view. Over twenty speakers took the stage, featuring influential personalities in the Laravel community and developers from the ecosystem. Let's review the conferences we enjoyed and share our experience as a Gold sponsor!

Christoph Rumpel spoke about automated testing. He explained that before parallelization, which becomes necessary as more and more unit tests are added, having setup and preparation phases standardized across all tests yields an initial performance boost.

Tobias Petry talked about database scaling. After specifying that we should start with data and table structure, he continued with creating indexes, adding cache to queries and insisted on the need to use machines with large resources, which database systems are capable of using. If the limit becomes the number of connections (even with pooling), then we can switch to replication or, even better, sharding.

Tomas Votruba told us about his project Rector, which automates code migrations, useful for PHP, Laravel or Symfony version upgrades thanks to dedicated rulesets for each version.

Jess Archer, developer at Laravel, talked about the architecture implemented for Laravel Pulse, a product that aggregates production logs. She explained the constraints and requirements that led to the choice of MySQL after unsuccessful trials with Redis, and also detailed the queries used to prepare the data to avoid excessive processing time during consultation.

Joe Dixon, developer at Laravel, introduced us to a new product for adding real time to our applications, Laravel Reverb. Based on WebSocket, it can be used by enabling broadcast and with Laravel Echo thanks to Pusher integration. Using other technologies (Server-Side Events), Mercure has been offering an equivalent solution for several years now.

Our co-operator Kévin Dunglas presented FrankenPHP, a new PHP Server API built with Go and Caddy, focusing on performance gains, the worker mode, support for Early Hints (103 status code) thanks to the removal of PHP-FPM, and finally its integration with Laravel Octane. The recent addition of the ability to create a standalone static binary encapsulating the entire application was also presented. We'll be publishing a detailed presentation of this new server very soon. Subscribe to our RSS feed and our social networks to make sure you don't miss it!

Laravel creator Taylor Otwell has unveiled version 11 of the framework. Upgrading from version 10 will be completely transparent and effortless. Configuration has been reworked, with the addition of default values and fewer files to create when bootstrapping our projects. A few new methods will also be added to the framework, simplifying the developers experience. Taylor also reviewed the latest features and products, including Laravel Pulse, Laravel Reverb, FrankenPHP integrated into Laravel Octane, and the addition of new options in Laravel Vapor. Lastly, Laravel Herd was highlighted, with the announcement of Windows compatibility and a Pro version for enhanced development observability with Xdebug, among others.

After this first Laravel event in an amazing venue, we are eager to continue engaging with the Laravel community, given the warm reception we received. As previously announced, the support of Laravel has been in progress within API Platform for a couple of weeks and still requires some work to deliver an experience that meets the standards of the ecosystem. We look forward to presenting the final version at the API Platform Conference next September!