Warning: This post is over a year old. I don't always update old posts with new information, so some of this information may be out of date.
While Laravel has had the ability to cast your data to and from JSON since version 5.0, it was previously just a convenience—your data was still just stored in a TEXT field. But MySQL 5.7 introduced an actual JSON column type.
Laravel 5.3 introduces a simple syntax for lookups and updates based on the value of specific keys in your JSON columns.
