Laravel and Vue.JS — What Makes Them such a Power Couple?
By: Citrusbug Technolas
Tags: Website Development, Web App Development, Vuejs, Web Development, Laravel

Laravel and Vue JS both are recognized as elite web development frameworks and integrating both of them can build some awesome web applications.

Taylor Otwell launched Laravel as a progressive PHP framework in 2011. The focus was on leveraging the Model-View-Controller (MVC) principles to create an open-source framework accessible to all developers and designers. Hence, the first thing you notice while using Laravel is how it makes the entire development process more simplified without compromising the performance.

Laravel is relatively easy to use, flexible, and performs well even at a scale. That is why it is considered one of the fastest-growing frameworks, with 51.4% of developers in the Stack Overflow 2019 survey saying that they love it.

Vue.JS is one of the most adaptive JavaScript frameworks. It is used by a varied set of developers and designers who are creating interactive UIs. Its core library is rich with scalable elements and integrates very well with other JavaScript libraries, making it one of the most preferred front-end development frameworks.

Most projects use Vue.JS for prototyping and for creating interactive single-page web applications. As it is engineered from scratch with JavaScript, it is quite scalable. That is probably why 66% of developers in the Stack Overflow 2019 survey stated they loved the framework.

The above graph of Google Trends clearly demonstrates that Laravel and Vue JS have gained collective traction recently as their combined use in projects yields development teams more efficiency, greater control, and higher scalability. It has been all the more important for any development team to understand why it should use Laravel and Vue.JS as both frameworks have been designed to simplify development and to create interesting UI elements.

Understanding Laravel and Vue.JS

In its nearly decade-long run, Laravel has garnered a large community of developers and product owners. Businesses like Pfizer, BBC, and 9GAG use Laravel in their projects. All the configurations are made out of the box in Laravel, making authentication a very approachable process. It also offers a more straightforward authorization logic organization functionality. On top of this, some of the most dreaded threats like SQL injection and cross-site scripting are automatically taken care of when developers use Laravel.

Laravel is a very cost-effective framework as it demarcates business logic code and presentation code by separating model, controller, and view between HTML designers and developers. This makes bug-fixing and iterations a streamlined process without allocating extra resources. Moreover, the Laravel command scheduler allows you to use only one Cron entry on the server and schedule commands within the framework.

Vue.JS comes with its own set of advantages. Despite its 18–21 KB size, it performs on par with bulkier frameworks like Angular and React. Vue.JS is built on JavaScript, providing seamless integration across all web applications that use JavaScript. Since it’s quite easy to learn, developers can use it to develop new web apps and update the existing ones. Vue JS is also used by many popular brands including GitLab, Behance, and Laravel itself.

Vue.JS is one of the few frameworks with very comprehensive documentation. The entire documentation is so easy to understand that — as far as the developer is comfortable with JavaScript of HTML — she/he can easily develop fluency in Vue.JS. It also has many common principles with Angular and React, making Vue.JS all the more approachable for new programmers. You can write Vue.JS templates in HTML or JavaScript files, making it a useful framework for applications that are run directly on browsers.

Why Should You Consider Laravel + Vue.JS for Your Next Web Application?

Build a Seamless Front-end Experience

Most users expect a flawless UX as soon as they land on the web application. Even the smallest of errors can cause an increase in bounce rates. Vue.JS helps you put all essential elements dynamically on the front-end, making the web application event-driven. Instead of reloading the entire page, consuming more data, and taking longer to load a dynamic page, you can use the Laravel framework to call just the UX elements that have to be tweaked for user-actions.

This way, all the UX weight-lifting is shifted to the front-end, which can perform very well as Laravel supports the web application and server communication.

Streamline the Fronted Development Process

As web applications are scaled, the data volume can start becoming more resource-consuming with each update. This incremental load starts showing up in the web app’s performance. Soon, the page starts showing lags instead of instantly responding to updates. This is a common challenge with most other JavaScript libraries (with the exception of Vue.JS) that don’t possess a virtual DOM. Vue.JS automatically keeps track of the dependencies between elements. Because of this, whenever an update is launched, it updates only the data that requires a change. Since it works seamlessly with data flow management tools like Redux and Flux, it is the ideal tool to combine with Laravel so as to avoid any update lag issues.

Efficient Single-Page Application Development

Both Vue.JS and Laravel are designed to support single-page web applications. Users who live in areas with low-bandwidth would prefer single-page applications since they consume less data. Even users who do not have such constraints will appreciate the ease of use and increased loading speeds of single-page applications.

Single-page web applications essentially rewrite the elements on the same page that the user visited and interacted with, instead of loading entirely new pages in the browser as the user interacts with one page. This saves a lot of redundant development that would bring resource-constraints into the development process.

Steep Learning Curve

Vue.JS is entirely built on JavaScript, which is already one of the most popular scripting languages used by seasoned and new programmers. If you have used Vanilla JS, Angular JS, React JS, jQuery, JavaScript, HTML, or any other language that binds data, you will find it easy to equip yourself with Vue.JS skills. Unlike its alternatives (such as Angular), Vue.JS works more on abstractions instead of plain JavaScript. This makes the internal coding relatively easy to execute.

For Laravel, if you have even a basic understanding of Object-Oriented Programming, PHP, and web development, you will be able to learn the framework in next to no time. The complete documentation is available on the official Laravel website, making the whole process of learning the framework more structured.

By developing these two skill sets internally, your development team can save itself from its dependence on the human capital market. Finding skilled JavaScript programmers can be an expensive task, as the average salary of a JavaScript developer can be as high as $85,000 in the USA.

In Conclusion

Put together, Vue.JS and Laravel augment your web application’s efficiency from the development process all the way to the page-load speeds. They provide your team members with comprehensive documentation to get them started and a rich library of modules to execute common tasks. Since both of them extensively support front-end development, your end-product is bound to perform well (as long as you use them in the right combination).