danwhite85
11/19/2012 - 4:37 PM

Laravel 4 Thoughts/Questions/Etc.

Laravel 4 Thoughts/Questions/Etc.

Laravel 4 Thoughts/Questions/Etc.

This is just a random list of notes, as I dig into Laravel 4. If you have any feedback/solutions, please leave a comment. I'll be compiling everything for an article on Nettuts+, when the framework is officially in Beta. This will be updated over the course of the week.

  • Running composer dump-autoload after every new controller is a pain. Can this not be automated through artisan controller:make ControllerName?

  • Seems that some of the View HTML helpers are missing. No HTML::script().

  • Route::resource('tasks', 'TasksController') doesn't seem to create named routes. This is a big deal, if not. What's the solution?

  • If you come from the Rails-flavor of REST, it'll take some re-tooling to learn the new RESTful method names. PHP can't use names, like "new," so that can be confusing. "create" is used instead.

  • Routing wildcards are different in L4. Rather than (:num) or (:any), you can name them. Route::get('tasks/{id}');. Much better.

  • A lot of the helpers are missing. I guess I see why that was done, but I'll likely end up implementing the most used ones on my own (dd(), etc.)

  • Why does Laravel 4 now require me to specify the table name in my models? Why not use a natural default so that I can type less - such as the plural form of the class name?

  • return Task::all() will now return a JSON representation, which is super helpful. It makes building RESTful APIs along with something like Backbone as easy as possible.

  • artisan key:generate doesn't seem to be currently available.