The New and Exciting Features of Laravel 9

It’s best to always keep up with the latest version to benefit from the newest features and support. With that being said, don’t rush to update if it’s not necessary. Take time to plan the update, check if the packages your app depends on also have a newer version supporting Laravel 9 and PHP 8, and don’t forget to change the hosting environment accordingly.

Laravel 8 and 9 differ in PHP and framework improvements. Laravel 9 requires PHP 8.0, which offers new features such as named arguments, union types, and the nullsafe operator. It also includes features like anonymous migration classes, controller route groups, forced scoping of route bindings, and an improved exception page.

Yes, Laravel is still relevant for three reasons: it's easy for junior devs, has distributed caching support and a large ecosystem, and there are numerous packages available to accelerate development.