Today, I was looking at making a final decision on whether to use a React or Vue frontend. My prototype has been coming along, but I had just been using plain PHP blade templates with Vanilla Javascript for quickness.
I think web development has got totally overcomplicated, and that you can go a long way with vanilla stuff. I would never start a PHP project without Laravel however, since I know it has virtually everything I need to build whatever I want.
Since LLMs have come about, there’s a lot to be said for just writing functionality in javascript; but ultimately you do want to benefit from a frontend framework. State management, DOM manipulation and an event bus are reasons why I want to use them. And of course, components. Was a shame the official WebComponent standard is so poor.
React Or Vue? Or Livewire?
The age old debate for a developer. It’s annoying quite frankly at this point to continually decide what to use. I prefer the simplicity of Vue syntax, but I often use graduates from a bootcamp that teaches React, and I have bought quite a few premium templates that React also. To be honest though, with LLMs it’s so easy to switch between.
Then there’s LiveWire. Each time I’ve tried to get into LiveWire I’ve been put off by it. But I had the same resistance when I got into Flutter and once I persevered I loved it.
In order to decide on the choice, I looked into Filament.
Filament
Filament is TALL stack (Tailwind, Alpine, Laravel, Livewire) … and i’ve used previous versions being fairly impressed. This would be a bit of a few steps back in order to take a leap forward, but taking a look at the excellent Laracasts for it, I’m starting to see the benefits.
- The resource creation gives the CRUD UI upfront … this is slightly different from the CRUD UI generation that I have been working on… since my ones are more ‘on-the-fly’ than ones that get defined in the yaml files. Still the resource creation results in a full on CRUD interface with sortable datatables out of the box.
- The form library is pretty much flawless. No more messing about with forms.
- Select options can be configured with enums and gets all enforced really nicely.
- Multi-tenant stuff out of the box
- Can hook up with Laravel Stripe for subscriptions
Laravel Herd
- I’ve been a fan of Laravel Sail for a while, but that’s only because it abstracted complication away from me. Whilst I get tired of learning new things, that’s no reason to not embrace something that works even better. Enter Laravel Herd. Some benefits:
- I don’t have to use Docker Desktop. Which decides to hog a huge amount of system memory. You can change this in settings, but overall Herd is a lot faster.
- For some reason, my local composer would not install the laravel CLI tool to my local machine. So I had to resort to installing Laravel via some shell scripts. Herd got it installed immediately
- Herd includes TinkerWell, some debugging tools, and general system configuration
Consultancy Fees
I’m getting tired of being asked to ‘look into stuff’ and expecting it to be done for free. Need to have a consultancy page hooked up to a simple credit card thing.
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