In this chapter, you learned how to speed up the routing through route caching. You also learned how to replace Laravel entirely with Lumen, the microframework entirely derived from Laravel. Finally, we discussed how Laravel can use a read and write configuration to take full advantage of a master and slave configuration.

Symfony 2.7 was released in May, 2015. It is a long-term support version. This version will be supported for 36 months. Shortly after that, Taylor Otwell made the decision to create the first LTS version of Laravel. This is the first sign that Laravel is firmly positioned in the enterprise space. There is no formal company behind Laravel yet, as there is in the case of Symfony and Zend. Yet there is a large ecosystem of community packages and services such as Laracasts, run by Jeffrey Way who works very closely with Taylor to provide official training videos.

Also, Taylor Otwell runs a service called Envoyer that removes any and all of the initial barriers to Laravel deployment and provides zero downtime deployment for Laravel as well as other types of modern PHP projects.

With the arrival of Laravel 5.1 LTS, many new and exciting things will be happening for Laravel. The decision to use many community packages allows Taylor and his community to focus on the most important aspects of the framework without having to reinvent the wheel and maintain many redundant packages. Also, Laravel Collective maintained the packages that have been deprecated—even packages that are eventually removed from Laravel will continue to be supported for many years to come.

In addition to convenient services, such as Envoyer, the next chapter will present a great automation tool that has recently emerged: Elixir.