Tech For Startups
I believe that Laravel + Vue makes a great combination in various aspects of the web development industry. In this article, we will take a closer look at each of these technologies.
Nowadays, we have notable hype in the selection of technologies across industries. I’m 100% sure every day you hear Python, Node, React, AI, Machine Learning, etc. Modern startups, forward-thinking entrepreneurs, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are looking for more encouraging and groundbreaking technologies to deliver more elegant satisfaction of use to their users while supporting the best velocity and productivity in their development processes.
The combination of Laravel and Vue results in fast, secure and impressive apps that need minimum time to go from idea to app delivery.
Startups and SMEs are opposed to going for any technology that no longer leading attention updated to the present requirements of the web and mobile interfaces, but I believe that as long as we are capable of solving the business problem, tech stack variety is not such a critical issue.
Let’s review the technical aspects, its strengths and try answering why our team considers Vue + Laravel — the Perfect Combination.
PHP has 73% of the market as one of the most popular and widely used programming languages. Laravel is PHP’s fastest-growing framework owing to its scalability, ease of use, and flexibility. It was created to develop full-featured websites and is the best choice for web app developers who seek powerful, simple and elegant toolkit to create balanced applications with good speed.
Key strengths of Laravel:
- Laravel is secure. Laravel secures web apps by protecting it against the most dangerous security risks: cross-site request forgery, SQL injection, and cross-site scripting.
- Laravel is flexible — you can use its template system to build server-side rendered apps, or you can provide the REST API and use any SPA framework you want. We suggest using Vue to build the client app side.
- Laravel has a simple implementation of authentication because it’s configured out-of-the-box. Moreover, it has a simple way to organize authorization logic and control access to resources.
- If you want to quickly implement sending of mail through a local or cloud-based service, Laravel has many drivers for SMTP, Mailgun, Mandrill, Amazon SES, PHP’s “mail” function. Not enough? Laravel supports sending notifications over a variety of delivery channels, including SMS (via Nexmo) and Slack.
- Environment & configuration management — managing development and production environments, and their related configurations (DB config, S3 config) is a piece of cake.
- Straight out-of-the-box Laravel supports following cache backends — Memcached and Redis. By default, it is configured to use the file cache driver, which stores cached objects in the file system. If you run a large application, I recommend using Memcached or APC. Though, it is possible to configure multiple cache configurations.
- Laravel is integrated with the Monolog logging library, which supports a variety of powerful log handlers. Error & exception handling is already configured for any new Laravel project.
- Built with testing in mind and supports testing with PHPUnit as it is included out-of-the-box and a phpunit.xml file is already setup for the application. It provides easy ways for simulating the basic behavior of users (making requests to the application and examining the output, for example, clicking links, filling out forms).
- The Laravel queue service provides a unified API across a variety of different queue backends. Queues allow you to defer the processing of a time-consuming task, such as sending an e-mail, until a later time, which drastically speeds up web requests to your application.
Vue has been trending since 2015 — Despite initially being written by just one person, Vue has been widely adopted by many developers and is on par with Angular and React. If looked at its core, it is focused on the view layer of an application. Hence, integrating it with various other platforms or existing applications is quite simple.
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Key strengths of Vue.js:
- Vue is showing great results with about 1,287,996 weekly downloads. Over 152K thousand Github stars prove the rising popularity and reflect the views of the community as well. Vue is now being used all over the world. This means that there will be more and more solutions compatible with this JS framework.
- The support of Vue and Laravel allows building web apps using two of the most progressive technologies without any additional installations.
- Vue uses pure JavaScript, so there’s no need for the developers or testers to learn any other programming language or its variation.
- Compared to Angular and React, Vue is the easiest frontend technology to learn and start working with.
- One of the significant advantages of Vue is the small size of the framework as it doesn’t include many features right “out of the box”, but the functionality is easily extended with a variety of third-party solutions. Vue is often compared to Angular, which is a monolithic framework with a bunch of built-in features, which are unlikely to be used in your app at all.
A full-featured Vue 2 project with Vuex + Vue-router weighs ~30kb gzipped.
The AOT-compiled app generated by angular-CLI weighs ~130kb gzipped.
- A compact size and the ability to include third-party modules to extend the functionality make Vue a wiser choice for those who care about reducing the size, and therefore improving the speed of the web app.
- The templates in Vue are written in HTML, which makes them readable without the knowledge of other programming languages.
- You can trigger UI changes that are seamless with your Vue frontend, which in turn gives your users an amazing experience. It could be as simple as making a text on your page editable or swapping out an entire component to load up a video requested by a user without reloading the page.
- Just like Angular, Vue is an MVC (or Model-View-Controller) framework. The advantage is obvious — the ability to write well-structured code, which is extremely important when working on complex applications.
- Apps built with Vue have the highest performance in comparison to other frontend frameworks due to lighter-weight virtual DOM (Document Object Model) implementation.
- Vue automatically syncs the whole model with the DOM due to 2-way data binding.
Wrapping It Up
Today’s web apps are interactive, speedy and users demand seamless UX. Vue allows you to build full-scale apps that are event-driven and have all of the activity to effectively handle on the frontend. Given that it couples nicely with Laravel, you will only need to make a few trips to request data from your Laravel app and make UI changes by switching components without reloading the page.
In this article, we wanted to clearly state that it will not be an exaggeration to say that Laravel & Vue have a new generation framework that enhances the overall web development experience of startups, small businesses and enterprises alike.
If you are looking for uncompromising frontend and backend technology solutions for building web applications, there is no better alternative than this combination. My mission is to fulfill your startup’s long-term goals and missions.
Connect with me on LinkedIn to talk about startups. We will help to turn your startup idea into a high-end revenue machine!
