The past and future of Livewire

Yoooo. Caleb (creator of Livewire) here, I've been in a hole for the past few months dreaming up the future of Livewire and am going to show it to you all on stage at Laracon US in four days. I can not express how pumped I am. Livewire version 3 was a big step forward for Livewire. It was a complete rewrite of the framework. It took me almost two years to build. We've come a long way since then. When it was released (at Laracon 2023), there were 26k daily composer installs. Now, there are 85k! As great as Livewire is right now, there are two problems that keep me up at night: People are confused and frustrated by having too many options when it comes to component structure (Traditional class-based, Volt class-based, and Volt functional). Livewire allows you to build an app in record speed, but if you don't know some of the ins and outs, you can end up with pages that feel slow and laggy. These two points are my problem statement for Livewire version 4. I want to make sure that using Livewire is a fantastic, fast, and intuitive experience from `composer require` all the way to deployment. Before I take the stage, let me address two questions up front: A) Will there be tons of breaking changes? Nope! Everything we're working on is currently public on the main branch of the Livewire repo. Nearly everything I'll be demoing is invisible, or additive. It's either a pure optimization that will just improve your app as-is, OR it's an opt-in feature that you can adopt incrementally. In this release, more than any in the past, we're dedicated to backwards compatibility. B) When will it be officially released? We don't have a specific timeline right now, but here are a few data points for you: Thanks to the revenue from Flux (thanks for buying!), Livewire has its first full-time employee besides me (Josh Hanley) who is working on Livewire 4 full time right now. This means we can go much faster than we have in the past. This is not a complete rewrite. Most of these features sit on top of the existing Livewire foundation which means we can spend all our time on new stuff and not rebuilding (and potentially breaking) old stuff. I sorely need to get this thing out the door so that I can get back to building even more powerful Flux components that leverage the power of Livewire 4. Thank you for being a part of this community and journey. Stay tuned, Caleb ​ ​

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