Sharp 7 for Laravel is released

The beta has ended, with a final refactoring on entities and menu declaration

This new year starts for us with the release of Sharp 7.0, after ~8 weeks of beta, and many bugs fixed in the process. Almost all new features and stuff were presented in the dedicated post written in November, so I encourage you to read this first:

👉 https://medium.com/code16/sharp-for-laravel-the-age-of-reason-37f1e1d8f181

To find out more about Sharp 7, start here; you’ll find the documentation (note that Sharp 6 documentation is still available), and an online demo; and you can join us on Discord to find help or to start a discussion.

But wait, what has changed since the beta?

One thing, one final (quite big) refactoring was merged, without new breaking change, aiming to shrink Sharp config file, with success, and also leading to add control over entity and menu declaration, and to refactor dusty parts of the codebase.

From a developper perspective, this allows to change this config/sharp.php file (from Sharp 6):

… into this in Sharp 7, which is in my opinion a lot more easy to read and understand:

All the config is moved to classes, with new APIs to declare entities and menu, which is more convenient (IDE autocomplete), readable and flexible — since you can, for instance, decide to bind a different Form for an entity depending on the user.

All of this is documented in detail, but here’s an example of a simple entity class, just to show that it can be almost as small as a config array:

Of course, you can extend methods instead of attributes, if you need more control

And it is way easier to build the menu with the new expressive API:

But you can argue that one single config file in quicker to build in case of a small project; because of this (and to avoid breaking change) and even if this new way of declaring entities and menu is heavily recommended for new project, the config-based method is still supported.

That’s it; we at Code 16 hope you’ll enjoy Sharp 7; we use it daily on our projects, and very much intend to keep it open source like today. For any Sharp related question, feel free to reach me on twitter.