The Best Combination Ever

Early this year, we needed to build a prototype for a mobile application and considering our team size, we of-course had to do hybrid. As u might guess, we were using the ionic framework. But there was one problem: Angular 2 was verbose. It was all over our faces. Our development speed was slow-er and we almost missed the deadline.

source  Google Images

To be honest, we did not know it was a problem at the time as Angular 1 came as a blessing. Imagine the joy that filled your heart when you first used two-way data binding. So we thought we had a lot of catching up to do on Angular 2. 

By March, i met an old colleague who was thanking me for introducing him to vuejs and how he got promoted in his organization because he introduced it and led the team that re-wrote their e-commerce service. Actually, i stumbled on vuejs in October of 2016. I liked the syntax and immediately introduced it to few people but continued writing my angular because vue did not look to me like it could be used for large applications.

So i decided to give vuejs another chance. I introduced it to the team and in 2 weeks, we felt like Evan you; like we knew everything about the framework. Just kidding. We searched for a corresponding mobile framework built on vue and we found quasar. The combination seemed so perfect and before the end of that month, we had a replica of our ionic project. We knew we had made the right choice. Vuejs + Quasar =  Solid Hybrid App.

source: Google images

But this is not the combination i'm referring to.

Like many modern php team, we love laravel and everything it ships with. Folks in the programming community have a way of slandering php and relegating its developers to the background, but heyyy! Laravel ( and some other frameworks e.g, CI, Symfony e.t.c) has changed the game. The reason is because laravel is simple! We needed something simple-r on the front end. Having used angular pretty well, it was not even tough to decide that vuejs was going to be our official frontend framework. Shortly after that, Laravel announced vuejs was their official framework. We were glad.

source:  Google Images

No combination could be better. 

• Laravel is simple, vue is simple-r.
• You can quickly develop a prototype with both frameworks, and still scale properly when building the real thing.
• They're both very intuitive and simple to approach.
• They both do not impose any strict ideology and coding conventions.
• Coding is so much fun with both.
• Laravel is a pinch of magic. Vue is the right amount of magic.
• They have each other's back (lol).

Now here's the logic. It is already common knowledge that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication and simple things are the most powerful most times. Since Laravel and Vue are about the simplest when compared to their contemporaries, can we not safely assume that they are the best combination? OK, lets continue. Javascript is a very light and simple language. I mean in the days before jquery, javascript was easily approachable, that some "real programmers" called it a toy language. As frameworks emerged, it started getting more complex than necessary and the Same goes for php. Now Jack welch said Don’t make the process harder than it is. So far, Laravel and Vue have strived to follow this rule. Can we still not assume that they are the best combination? I think we can!

NB: Please do not confuse simple with easy. In fact simplicity is tougher to achieve most times.

I must mention that react is also fantastic. One of my concerns is that HTML code is not easily reusable with react but since Vuejs gives me that on a platter, i won't even look back.