Development

API Platform 4.3 shipped March 13, 2026. The headline addition is MCP support: your API resources can now be exposed as tools and resources for LLM agents with no extra infrastructure. Alongside that, two quality-of-life improvements stand out — Scalar as an alternative documentation UI, and security checks that fire before the state provider runs. MCP server support The Model Context Protocol is the emerging standard for connecting LLMs to external tools and data sources. 4.3 ships an experimental MCP integration that maps directly onto the API Platform resource model. ...

Symfony 8.0 shipped November 27, 2025, same day as 7.4. It requires PHP 8.4 and drops everything that was deprecated in 7.4. The two most interesting changes are what it stops doing and what it starts doing with PHP 8.4. Native lazy objects Symfony’s proxy system, used for lazy service initialization and Doctrine’s entity proxies, has historically relied on code generation. The proxy classes were generated at cache warmup, stored as files, and loaded when needed. It worked, but it added real complexity: generated files to manage, cache to invalidate, code that looked nothing like the class it proxied. ...

Symfony 7.4 landed November 2025, alongside 8.0. It’s the last LTS of the 7.x line: PHP 8.2 minimum, three years of bug fixes, four of security. For teams that can’t or won’t follow 8.0’s PHP 8.4 requirement, 7.4 is where you land. Message signing in Messenger Transport security in Messenger has always been the application’s problem to solve. 7.4 adds message signing: a stamp-based mechanism that signs dispatched messages and validates signatures on reception. ...

PHP 8.5 shipped November 20th. Two features define this release: the pipe operator and the URI extension. They solve different problems, but both share the same motivation: making common operations less awkward to express. The pipe operator Functional pipelines in PHP have always been a mess. Chaining transformations meant either nesting function calls inside out, or breaking them into intermediate variables: // before — read right to left $result = array_sum(array_map('strlen', array_filter($strings, 'strlen'))); // or verbose but readable $filtered = array_filter($strings, 'strlen'); $lengths = array_map('strlen', $filtered); $result = array_sum($lengths); // after — read left to right $result = $strings |> array_filter(?, 'strlen') |> array_map('strlen', ?) |> array_sum(?); The |> operator passes the left-hand value into the right-hand expression. The ? placeholder marks where it goes. Pipelines now read in the order operations happen: left to right, top to bottom. ...

API Platform 4.2 arrived in September 2025. Three changes stand out: a JSON streamer for large collections that avoids buffering the entire response in memory, an ObjectMapper that replaces the manual wiring in stateOptions-based DTO flows, and autoconfiguration of #[ApiResource] without explicit service registration. JSON streamer for large collections The default Symfony serializer builds the full response in memory before writing it to the output. For a collection of 10,000 items, this means allocating a PHP array, serializing it to a string, and keeping both in memory until the response is flushed. At scale, this is the source of the OOM errors that force people to add pagination everywhere. ...

API Platform 4.1 arrived in February 2025 with a batch of features that are less about new capabilities and more about making the existing ones production-ready. Strict query param validation gets a first-class property. OpenAPI gains a mechanism for splitting large APIs into separate specs. GraphQL gets the abuse prevention controls it was missing. Strict query parameter validation 3.3 introduced query parameter validation as opt-in. 3.4 deprecated the loose behavior. 4.1 formalizes it with a native strictQueryParameterValidation property on resources and operations: when set to true, unknown query parameters return 400. ...

The search box on the media library returned results in 800 milliseconds on staging. Production had forty times more rows. The query plan showed a sequential scan: no index involved, no way to fix it with a standard B-tree. The product team also wanted multi-word search: type “interview president”, get results containing both words. A LIKE query with wildcards has no clean way to express that without multiple independent conditions, each requiring its own scan. ...

PHP 8.4 released November 21st. Property hooks are the feature. Everything else, and there’s quite a bit of it, is secondary. Property hooks For twenty years, if you wanted behavior on property access in PHP you had to write getters and setters: class User { private string $_name; public function getName(): string { return $this->_name; } public function setName(string $name): void { $this->_name = strtoupper($name); } } PHP 8.4 adds hooks directly on the property: class User { public string $name { set(string $name) { $this->name = strtoupper($name); } } } You can define get and set hooks independently. A property with only a get hook is computed on access: ...

API Platform 4.0 shipped nine days after 3.4, in late September 2024. The version number is honest: there is no new architecture, and the migration from 3.4 is short if you resolved the deprecations. What makes this a major is the scope change — API Platform is no longer a Symfony-only framework — and one opinionated default that reverses six years of PUT behavior. Laravel as a first-class target Since its first release, API Platform was built on Symfony. The HTTP layer, metadata, serializer, and Doctrine bridge all assumed Symfony’s container, event dispatcher, and request lifecycle. Laravel users could run API Platform through a thin adapter, but filters, security, and Doctrine integration did not work on Eloquent. ...

API Platform 3.4 landed in September 2024 as the last minor before the 4.0 jump. The headline feature is BackedEnum as full resources — not just a typed field, but an enum that is itself an API endpoint. BackedEnum as API resources Since PHP 8.1, BackedEnum classes have a fixed set of cases with string or integer backing values. API Platform 3.4 lets you put #[ApiResource] directly on a BackedEnum: ...