You may be wondering how VueJS and Laravel could have anything to do with each other. VueJS is a Javascript framework and Laravel is a PHP framework, and there can’t possibly be any way that they could serve any purpose to each other, or could they? And remember, you can always hire a developer if at any point you feel that things are going over your head.
To understand that, however, you first need to enlighten yourself with so many facts, and this is that one exhaustive stop where you will find everything you need to know about both of these frameworks, let alone how they are going to be useful for each other. Let’s talk about Vue.JS first.
A Little Brief About Vue.JS
If you didn’t know it already, Vue.JS is a really advanced Javascript framework that was built for designing User Interface and single-page applications. Developed by Evan You, the VueJS is an open-source javascript framework that has an adaptable architecture. It focuses on declarative rendering and component composition.
At present, Vue.js has more than 148k stars on GitHub, which speaks for its popularity among developers. If you’re a front-end framework enthusiast, then you’ll be surprised as to how seamlessly it can be integrated into large projects and simplify the web development process.
Top 5 Features of VueJS
Till now, everything I said above has been all show and no go, but let’s get down to its specific features and show you why Vue should be your next framework:-
Virtual Dom
Any modifications you introduce in Vue are not directly reflected in the DOM. Rather, a copy of DOM is created as a Javascript data structure. If the changes are required to be made, then they are introduced in the Javascript of the data structure. It is then compared with the initial data structure, which saves a whole lot of time.
Data Binding
Data binding is a process by which a user can manipulate the elements of a webpage using a web browser. It utilizes dynamic HTML and doesn’t require any complex scripting or programming. With the help of this function, you can easily manage values or assign them to HTML attributes.
Components
One of the signature features of VueJS is its ability to reuse the components. These components help you extend the basic HTML elements to encapsulate reusable code.
Animation/ Transition
In VueJS, you will find several ways to apply transition in HTML elements when they are added or removed from the DOM. It has a built-in transition component that has to be wrapped around the element for the transition effect. We can also add third party animation libraries.
Templates
Vue.JS comes packed with HTML-based templates that bind the DOM with Vue instance data. Vuejs compiles these templates into virtual DOM Render functions. In order to make use of the render functions template, we will have to replace the template with the render function.
A Little Brief About Laravel
Laravel is a free and open-source web framework based on PHP. Laravel was created by Taylor Otwell and is designed to improve productivity. They have been coming out with a new version every 6 months, and they recently came out with their latest version 2 weeks ago on September 3rd, and this one comes with a Long-Term Support(LTS). Laravel comes packed with a plethora of features. Let’s go through some of them.
Top 5 Features of Laravel
Eloquent ORM
ORM or the Object-Relational-Mapping is a PHP implementation of the active record pattern. What it allows us to do is to present database tables as classes. In case you’re confused, what it means is that you can define a class, let’s say “User”, which will be tied to the “users” table in your database. Now every row in the “users” table will be represented as an instance of the User class in Laravel.
Template Engine
Laravel is highly acknowledged for its lightweight templates that can help you create amazing layouts using dynamic content seeding. On top of that, it has multiple widgets incorporating CSS and JS codes with solid structures. The templates of laravel frameworks are specifically designed to create a simple layout with distinctive sections.
Artisan
Laravel offers an inbuilt tool for command-line called Artisan. They are used to create the database structure, a skeleton code, and build their migration that becomes pretty easy-to-manage the database system. Not just that, but it can also be interlaced to generate the basic MVC files through the command-line in an instant, and manage those assets and their respective configurations.
Automatic Package Delivery
Back in the day, it wasn’t easy to install data packages, until Laravel 5.5 came out with a convenient solution. As the term suggests, Automatic Package Delivery automatically detects the packages that the user wants to install, without setting up any aliases or providers from installing new packages.
Database Migration
Laravel’s Command Line Interface(CLI) called Artisan makes database migration and seeding extremely easy. If you keep all of the database work in migrations and seeds, you can easily migrate the changes into any other development machine you have.
How does VueJS Work?
If you’ve ever programmed for the web before the day and age of event-driven frontend JavaScript frameworks, then you could probably understand the considerable difficulties and inefficiencies that would arise from trying to update the Document Object Model (DOM).
Updating the DOM simply means that you would have to take the page, make the necessary changes to a small part of it, and reload the entire DOM so the changes can take effect. For example, if you are watching a YouTube video and a new comment is made, the entire page would’ve had to reload, which also meant that your video would start from the beginning.
Vue strives to tackle these challenges by incorporating a virtual DOM to manage what the user will see. Like I stated above, what Vue essentially does is create a copy of the DOM and stores it. If any change is made to a part of the DOM, it updates just that very section of the DOM without reloading the entire DOM. This means the comments would update without you even noticing it.
Vue provides reactive and composable view components. It responds to any updates and triggers the required changes in the DOM instantaneously. Its composable components can be selected and assembled in various combinations to satisfy whatever need arises. You can have components for everything and reuse them however you need. If it’s something hard to comprehend, you can always hire a VueJS developer.
Why We Should Use Vue With Laravel?
Even though both Laravel and VueJS stem from different programming languages, and may seem irrelevant as to how VueJS could offer support to Laravel, but, to my surprise, it supports in more ways than one. Following are the reasons why you should use VueJS with Laravel:-
1. Everything Happens on the Frontend
The Web Applications of the present day and age are event-driven. They are built to make sure that the users have a seamless experience just like they would be using an application installed on their computer. All the changes now happen on the frontend and users will never have to reload a page again (courtesy of JavaScript).
2. Reactive Components Make for an Excellent Event-Driven App
Vue can help you build a full-scale event-driven web application that handles all activities on the frontend. It also provides composable components that can be used however you wish. Given that it couples nicely with Laravel, you will only need to make a few trips to request data from your Laravel application and make UI changes by switching components without reloading the page.
You can simply prompt UI changes in your Vue (frontend), which in turn offers an amazing experience to your users. 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.
Given Vue’s speed and performance, this happens very fast and smoothly without taking up so much of your computer resources.
3. Building Optimal Complex Frontend Pages
If you think of building an application with parts that need to update frequently, you have no other choice than to make the frontend run completely on JavaScript.
The challenge with vanilla JavaScript or jQuery or other JavaScript libraries that do not have a virtual DOM is that you quickly hit performance issues with the frequency of update increases or the volume of data to track for changes increases significantly. Changes to the DOM will gradually cease to be instantaneous and you begin to experience noticeable performance lags.
When you compose your application with Vue components, each component’s dependencies are automatically tracked during its render, so the system knows precisely which component actually needs to be updated when there is a change in data. This makes all updates to the DOM use minimal resources, thereby improving the overall application efficiency.
Vue is also compatible with state managers like Flux, Redux, and Vuex which are excellent in managing data flow in complex applications. Vue’s utilization of a one-way data-binding model also makes state management easier in complex applications.
4. Single Page Application
I would like to share a personal opinion — Single Page Applications are the greatest thing to happen to the internet in the last decade. It opens up applications to a wider audience of users than was possible before.
When you consider that many internet users outside of some parts of America and Europe have challenges getting on the internet, you begin to appreciate the role single page applications play in delivering a rich web experience to them.
Your entire application assets get loaded once (and most of it cached), all that your application does as the user engages with it is request data which typically requires low bandwidth to fulfill.
5. Easy to Learn and Use
Vue is easy to get into. It provides very few options for you as the developer and has a lot of abstracted away. You feel like you are writing plain JavaScript when you use Vue and you can make a simple application with plain JavaScript and it remains valid in Vue.
Another great thing about Vue is that your valid HTML is also a valid Vue template. You can keep your CSS external or you can process it with JavaScript depending on your application needs. You can also take advantage of scoped styling, to apply style changes to a single component on the fly without the change affecting other components.
If you are familiar with JavaScript, you can build a non-trivial application with Vue after just one day of reading the documentation.
