Taylor Otwell presents the new features in Laravel 5.3 at Laracon. He covers major updates including a new mailable system for cleaner email handling, Laravel Scout for full-text search functionality, Laravel Passport for OAuth2 authentication, and a new notification system. The talk demonstrates practical implementations of these features with live coding examples and explains how they simplify common development tasks.

Amanda Fulson gives a comprehensive introduction to building APIs with Lumen, Laravel's micro-framework. She explains how Lumen differs from Laravel, demonstrates creating a basic REST API for a Pokémon Pokedex application, and covers key concepts like routing, authentication, and testing in Lumen. The talk emphasizes Lumen's streamlined nature while maintaining compatibility with Laravel's core features.

The talk focuses on building and documenting APIs using Laravel/Lumen, with a particular emphasis on using Swagger/OpenAPI for API documentation and bridging the gap between client and server sides. The speaker discusses various tools and best practices for API development, including authentication methods, content negotiation, and code generation from Swagger documentation. The presentation concludes with a musical number encouraging developers to use Swagger for better API development.

TJ Miller presents a comprehensive talk on building and maintaining Laravel APIs, covering best practices from planning through implementation. He emphasizes the importance of documentation, resource responses, schema validation, and maintaining API contracts while sharing practical workflows and implementation patterns developed over years of experience building critical payment processing APIs.

Kirk discusses a comprehensive approach to validation in Laravel 4 applications, focusing on separating validation logic from models and controllers into dedicated validation classes. He demonstrates how to handle different validation scenarios through use-case specific validation classes and how to leverage Laravel's exception handling system to cleanly handle validation failures.

Taylor Otwell presents new features coming in Laravel 5.5, focusing primarily on API resource transformations and queue improvements. He demonstrates a new elegant way to transform Eloquent models for API responses using resources and collections, along with new queue features like time-based expirations and rate limiting with Redis. The talk includes live coding examples and covers conditional data transformations, relationship handling, and customizable response formats.

The speaker discusses moving from traditional API testing in Laravel to using API Blueprint specifications. He demonstrates how API Blueprint provides a language-agnostic way to define API structures using markdown, which can be tested using Dredd. The talk covers practical examples of implementing API specifications, using hooks for authentication, and organizing large APIs by splitting specifications into multiple files using Hercule.

A detailed presentation about creating APIs with Lumen, Laravel's micro-framework. The speaker explains how Lumen differs from Laravel, demonstrates building a RESTful API, and covers key concepts like routing, controllers, authentication, and testing. The talk uses a Pokemon-themed example API to illustrate core concepts while highlighting Lumen's strengths for API development.

Chris Tankersley presents on using OpenAPI to document and build APIs in Laravel. He explains how OpenAPI serves as a specification format for HTTP APIs, demonstrates tools like Stoplight Studio for API design, and shows how to generate Laravel boilerplate code from OpenAPI specs. The talk focuses on practical implementation using a to-do app example while highlighting the benefits of consistent API documentation and development.

Max presents his Laravel API Boilerplate project, which helps developers quickly build REST APIs. The boilerplate provides out-of-the-box functionality for common API features like CRUD operations, transformers, authorization, and case conversion between snake_case and camelCase. He demonstrates how to create API resources, handle relationships, and implement validation with minimal code while maintaining flexibility for custom business logic.