- Makers Make by SaaSykit
- Posts
- Laravel Cloud, Nightwatch, Starter kits, State of PHP, Automates Code Styling & more
Laravel Cloud, Nightwatch, Starter kits, State of PHP, Automates Code Styling & more
Ahmad
February 16, 2025
Hey Makers,
The past two weeks have been a whirlwind of excitement in the Laravel community! Laracon EU 2025 in Amsterdam delivered a series of awesome announcements. š
Here's an overview of them:
Laravel Cloud
Taylor Otwell unveiled Laravel Cloud, a revolutionary platform set to transform how we deploy Laravel applications. With Laravel Cloud, developers can seamlessly transition from a GitHub repository to a fully deployed project with a custom domain in just minutes. Currently supporting PostgreSQL databases, the platform plans to introduce MySQL integration shortly after its official launch on February 24, 2025.
Laravel Nightwatch
Introducing Laravel Nightwatch, a beautiful application monitoring tool tailored specifically for Laravel applications. Developed by the same team behind Laravel Cloud, Forge, and Vapor, Nightwatch offers unparalleled insights into application performance, ensuring developers can maintain optimal system health with ease.
New Laravel Starter Kits
To streamline the initiation of new projects, Laravel announced the consolidation of its starter kits. Developers can now select a single starter kit per stackāReact, Vue, or Livewireāduring installation. These kits come equipped with essential authentication screens like login, register, and password recovery, providing a robust foundation for new applications.
Fusion
Aaron Francis introduced Fusion, a great approach to integrating Laravel and JavaScript. Fusion offers a new paradigm for combining the strengths of both technologies, enabling developers to build more dynamic and responsive applications.
NativePHP for iOS
In a monumental leap, NativePHP is extending its capabilities to mobile platforms with the introduction of NativePHP for iOS. This pioneering tool empowers developers to craft truly native iOS applications using Laravel, running entirely on-device without the need for a web server. By leveraging a statically compiled version of PHP bundled into a Swift shell application, NativePHP manages the PHP environment seamlessly, allowing your code to run directly on iOS devices.
Personally, Iām very excited for Laravel Cloud, and will be testing it once I have access and sharing my insights on that š
New At SaaSykit
Code formatting is an essential part of maintaining a clean and readable codebase. Laravel Pint, a zero-configuration code styling tool for PHP, helps ensure your code adheres to consistent style rules. To automate this process, you can integrate Laravel Pint with a Git pre-commit hook, preventing non-compliant code from being committed.
From the Community
PHP continues to be a cornerstone of web development, powering millions of websites around the world. Its vibrant and dedicated community values its flexibility and ease of use. But what does the current state of PHP development look like? To uncover deeper insights and trends shaping the ecosystem, weāve turned to our in-house expert, Brent Roose, Developer Advocate for PHP, who will guide us through the results of the State of Developer Ecosystem Survey 2024. Join us as we explore the findings and learn how PHP developers are navigating the ever-evolving landscape of modern web development.
Laravel's Route::fallback provides an elegant way to handle requests that don't match any defined routes. Instead of showing a generic 404 page, you can create meaningful experiences for users who encounter missing pages.
Join us as we discuss the features and benefits of HydePHP, its integration with existing Laravel applications, and the motivation behind its creation.
Caen shares insights into the challenges of maintaining an open-source project and the importance of providing a quality developer experience. The conversation also touches on the use cases for HydePHP beyond blogging, including documentation, and introduces Caen's new project, Release.new, which generates release notes from Git history.
No routes, no controllers, just instant backend-to-frontend magic in your Laravel app. Fusion bridges the gap between PHP and JavaScript like never before. Watch as I demo its power, from hot module reloading to full two-way state sync, all without leaving your Javascript file. This is Laravel + JavaScript like you've never seen before.
The Repository Pattern is a common design pattern used in Laravel to separate the applicationās data access logic from the rest of the application. It provides an abstraction layer for interacting with the database or any data source, making it easier to switch between different data sources or change the underlying data access logic without affecting the rest of your application.
You probably think fast database queries are good. You also probably think slow database queries are bad. On top of all of these "thinks" you have about database queries - there is a certain Laravel method that, if you have seen it, you probably think you understandā¦but there is a chance you donāt.
Sometimes you have a small application and from cost and effort perspective you donāt want to spend more money and time on implementing Websockets in your application to give the real-time feelings to your users. And somehow you also donāt want to use Third-Parties like Pusher or Ably :)
All about SaaS
Alexander the Great supposedly kept a copy of The Iliad on his nightstand and a dagger under his pillow.
His ambitionāto become Achillesāwas just out of reach.
The means to do itāa daggerāwas directly within grasp.
On Grand Strategy by historian John Lewis Gaddis covers roughly 2,500 years of history, pulling from writers, statesmen, theologians, and political philosophers. Rather than presenting a single thesis, the book is more of a synthesisāsomething Gaddis pieced together over decades of teaching. The book is dense at times, simply because of the sheer range of ideas it engages with. But it stands as one of the most concise and nuanced explorations of grand strategy. I first encountered these ideas as a student in Johnās class at Yale.
Look at any popular brand, and youāll notice one thing: happy customers who tell others about it. For example, people who use iPhones or Teslas love to share how much they like them.
This kind of word-of-mouth marketing helps brands grow. When customers recommend a brand, it builds trust that ads canāt.
One way to see how well a brand is doing is with something called the Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS shows how likely customers are to tell others about the brand. A high score means customers are happy and likely to bring in new people.
Chunking PDFsāconverting them into neat, machine-readable text chunksāis a major headache for any RAG systems. Both open-source and proprietary solutions exist, but none have truly achieved the ideal combination of accuracy, scalability, and cost-effectiveness.
I had been dreaming about a light, funny email series to launch this Springās cohort of Deeper Foundations.
You were going to spend a few "days in the lifeā of two different business owners: one with a tactics-first approach, and the other who led with business foundations.
Those characters even had names!
Butā¦ the timing seemed off, for me and for you. Especially when itās quite so loud out there every day, I wasnāt sure a lighthearted attempt at business comedy would have landed.
In this case, Iām reading the room.
Drew Houston is the co-founder and CEO of Dropbox. Under his leadership, Dropbox has grown from a simple idea to a service used by over 700 million registered users globally, with a valuation exceeding $9 billion. Drew has led Dropbox through multiple phases, from explosive viral growth, to battling all the tech giants at once, to reinventing the company for the future of work. In our conversation, he opens up about:
Videos
Keep building, keep rocking! š¤