在今天的Laravel中，存储库是一个旧模式吗？

Question

I'm trying to learn Laravel. I can see old docs and videos (from Laravel 5.4) speaking of Repositories and repository pattern, meaning classes to work with collections of data. But on the current (5.7) Laravel docs, I cannot find any reference to Repositories or the pattern itself. So I'm wandering: are still used (and thus I should study them) or maybe the 'new' ones are what it's called 'Collections'? Or maybe they are not at all related?

Answer 1

Repositories are not implemented by default on Laravel. If you want to use them you need to implement yourself, or use a package. The repository pattern is a design pattern mainly use to abstract data access by returning standard classes for exemple, so this way if you decide to change your ORM from Eloquent to Doctrine, you will have to change only the repository, and the rest of your application will be fine. That help to build scalable and maintenable applications.

Now this is not mandatory at all, it's just good to know what it is and how to use it. But if your application is small, my advice would be : Don't bother with Repository. That's just gonna add more complexity to your code. But this is a really famous design pattern, so that's probably why it is in a lots of video and tutorials.

Collection : In Laravel, Collections are an object returned by the query builder when a query return more than one result. Collections have a lots of really handy methods to help you manipulate these data.