Route improvements are coming to Laravel 5.4

As Laravel 5.4 development continues, two new improvements are coming to your routes, better route caching for large applications and fluently registering routes.

#Route Caching Improvements

The route caching layer contains improvements that will allow route matching on very large applications to see a significant improvement. In this context very large is applications with more than one thousand routes defined.

#Fluent Registering Routes

In the past, if you wanted to define a named route or a middleware you would do it like this at the end of the closure:

Route::get('user/{id}/profile', function ($id) {
    //
})->name('profile');

Now you can define it at the beginning:

Route::name('profile')->get('user/{id}/profile', function ($id) {
    // some closure action...
});

Joseph Silber created the pull request to add this feature, and he outlined a few other examples of utilizing this new option:

Registering a route name and a middleware

Route::name('users.index')->middleware('auth')->get('users', function () {
    // some closure action...
});

Registering a middleware with a route prefix and group

Route::middleware('auth')->prefix('api')->group(function () {
    // register some routes...
});

Registering a middleware to a resource controller

Route::middleware('auth')->resource('photo', 'PhotoController');