I'm building an app with a TALL stack now (Tailwind, Alpine.js, Laravel, and Livewire) and I am incredibly productive. Very little build step required (to compile Tailwind to reduce the size based on which classes are used in .blade.php files). CRUD, Image uploads etc are so easily done I am such a fan. I was skeptical at first, but now I love this way of building web apps. No idea how well it scales, but for a simple MVP I couldn't have asked for a better stack.
Seriously, after all these years of JavaScript,SPA,react,redux craze, we're back at PHP, css and minimal js all over again. None of those new js frameworks allow you to build custom web apps faster than Laravel or Rails. I'm really curious about what kind of side projects all these people are building with e.g. next.js alone. Is there any kind of web app that doesn't need authentication, authorization and database access?
I write full SPAs at work, professionally. We use React, Apollo, GraphQL, Webpack etc. the TALL stack is such a breath of fresh air. I can't even begin to explain my joy. Just joy.
I now dread the time I have to write those infinite lines of JS, conflicting dependencies, slow build times, React hook state management etc.
When I speak with my colleagues about tech, they all seem to love the entangled mess of JS dev and willing to jump on any new framework that gets released. I always push for good old reliable SSR. Often get called the weird one for being young, yet favoring old school tech, though.
I guess I prefer a better developer experience and shorter time to production/market, rather than spending days trying to setup a project and figure out weird quirks and issues with such a complicated mess of a "serverless, modern day web application".
Regarding auth and db, the ones I've spoken with that prefer JS way of doing things like to combine a bunch of existing offerings into one, eg Auth0 for Auth, Prisma for DB and so on. The more potential points of failure, the more attractive it seems to them.
When saying that Laravel/RoR gives you all that by running one simple command, I get blank stares. Hard to believe, I know.
We've come to the point that being able to run code and render html on a server is considered a new feature (aka SSR and serverless functions). I recently watched the Next.js conf and i couldn't help but giggle.
-Do you want functions?
Use our proprietary platform
-Do you want to store content?
Use cloudinary, aws
- Authentication?
Auth0,firebase
- Database?
Use FaunaDb and our super cool new query language that nobody knows and cares about.
> Congratulations. You've built your new webapp on Jamstack. Now you have to manage large bills across hundreds of 3rd party services, vendor lock-ins. Also good luck trying to reproduce all that on a development machine or organize your code.
On the other hand you can just: laravel new project-name --jet and deploy on a single linux machine or heroku and you get:
-Robust and customizable Auth, password reset, 2fa
-A serious db like PostgreSQL and an orm
-SSR by default with 0kb bundle size!
-Any css tool you need
-Easy APIs, tokens and permissions
-Truly open source.You have full control of your code and data
So yeah it's just a command but yikes, who uses PHP in 2020, right?
The problem is then you'd have to use PHP or Ruby. Much as people say they've improved, they're not better than TypeScript. I wish someone made something like Laravel for TS. Sometimes I look at Laravel and think, sure it's great that they did all of that and are even making a bunch of money, but why did it have to be PHP of all languages?
Ah, sorry. I don't have much experience with RoR. Laravel, mostly, and Laravel auth is one command away. I assume RoR won't be too far away from that, too.
well, whenever I did rails, that was pretty standard. Laravel's baked in auth, is probably why it's so much better than rails, that and queues, telescope, etc... all the nice to haves that come standard in laravel that are extra in rails apps.
For all the speed bumps PHP 7 delivered Laravel typically scores lower than Django and Rails on Techempower benchmarks. This and the reality that PHP roles typically pay 20% less than Ruby, Python or Node has led me to ignore Laravel.
I haven't built anything that requires significant performance tweaking other than some caching and SQL optimisations. Maybe PHP 8 will bring an even better performance when it gets released
> HP roles typically pay 20% less
Yeah, true. Hence why I am a React dev professionally
I'm not saying any of Django, Rails or Laravel are fast compared with Node, ASP.Net or Spring but what surprised me was how PHP 7, which is a lot faster than Ruby or Python, somehow managed to fall behind when Laravel was added into the mix. It's as if PHP's performance gains only really apply to raw PHP or lightweight frameworks.
That's surprising to hear. Do you have any links that go into this (or show benchmarks)? I generally avoid PHP, but I've been thinking of looking into Laravel for when I do need to use PHP.
