Weekly updates #48/2021

Hey everyone. This is our weekly thread with news from the Laravel world, our weekly code tips, and other updates.

Ecosystem news

This week's updates from the Laravel world: thread

• 🔥 Next.js is hot in the Laravel world this week!
• 🎥 And second, Mohamed has recorded a video on using Next.js with Laravel earlier this week
• 🎉 Laravel and all of the first-party projects now support PHP 8.1
• 🤩 The laravel/laravel application skeleton is now using generic array types where possible.
• 📚 Not specific to Laravel but still a great resource for understanding the different ways frontend rendering can work
• 🏔 @Alpine_JS got a new feature that's similar to Teleport from Vue.js 3 and as always extremely intuitive to use
• 🎁 Lots of great things are part of this giveaway. Make sure you join in time
• 👀 In a few days, @LarsKlopstra will be launching Previewify --- his app for generating social previews. We're using it for the Tenancy docs and absolutely loving it!

Code tips

This week's code tips: thread

• 🔥 Use whereBelongsTo() and relation()->is() instead of comparing ids manually
• 🔥 You can validate user input inside middleware
• 🔥 You can pass parameters to Laravel middleware classes
• 🔥 You can use the spread operator to merge arrays, just like in JavaScript
• 🔥 Use the app()->terminating() hook to perform tasks after the response has been sent to the user
• 🔥 You can return custom collections from Eloquent queries
• 🔥 You can use giveConfig() when using contextual binding
• 🔥 You can use array{} annotations to specify the available keys (and their value types) in PHP arrays.
• 🔥 Use the 'afterMaking' or 'afterCreating' hooks in factories to execute additional logic
• 🔥 The latestOfMany() method lets you use a 'hasMany' relation as a 'hasOne' relation, returning the latest record