Why Choose Laravel Livewire to Build Full-stack & Large Scale Apps?

Introduction

Businesses nowadays have started investing more and more into the speed and performance of their apps and websites to survive the digital race. As the expectations of the users are growing day by day, businesses are looking forward to building a more dynamic frontend with the help of Laravel web development services Livewire framework.

But what is Livewire? This question might have been raised in your mind right?

Well, Livewire is Laravel’s full-stack framework that helps build simple dynamic interfaces. Long before, if you had to build an app using Laravel development service, you either need to hire laravel developers to:

• Write Blade templates and render the app from the server side or write down the backend as APIs that accept and respond with JSON, and then have a frontend framework like Vue, React, or Angular to consume the APIs and implement the UI.

But you now also have a third option; Livewire. 

With the help of Livewire, you can implement the following functionality, without reloading the page:

• Pagination
• Form validation
• Notifications
• File uploads preview

How does Livewire work?

• Livewire has the ability to render the initial component output to the page, just like a typical server that renders a Blade template.
• When there is an interaction, Livewire makes an AJAX request to the server with updated data.
• The server then re-renders the component and responds with the updated HTML
• At last, the Livewire intelligently mutates the DOM according to what changed.

So, you see, Livewire is like having frontend and a backend in one place without repeating the logic.

Concepts of Livewire

Activating Livewire

So, to get Livewire working on a page, you need to include Livewire styles and scripts on each page using @livewireStyles and @livewireScripts:

Components of Livewire

Talking about the components of Livewire, they are quite similar to Laravel Blade class-based components. Have a look at how both of these components are made.

Laravel Blade component

To create a Laravel Blade component, you will need to run the following command:

php artisan make:component Alert

When you run this command, a new Alert.php class file is created and placed in app\views\components folder. After that, a corresponding view template will be created and placed in resources\views\components. Then, if you wish to display that component, you can use <x-alert/> Blade syntax.

Livewire component

Like the Blade component, you will also need to run a command to create a Livewire component. While the command is:

php artisan make:livewire Alert

As soon as you run this command, it will create two new files: app\Http\Livewire\Alert.php\ and resources/views/livewire/alert.php, view template.

After that, you can render a Livewire component using this <livewire:alert /> or @livewire(‘alert’)

I know you are confused because both these commands look quite similar, but there is one major difference between them. When you run the Livewire component, there is a real-time sync, which means there is no page refresh required, between the component class and its view template.

Properties of Livewire

Here are some of the features of Livewire that help Laravel to do things that were only possible using the Laravel-JavaScript stack. Have a look at these things that enable Laravel to do things without the need for JavaScript.

Data binding

The concept of data binding is quite similar to front-end frameworks like Vue or Angular. Livewire has the ability to change the current HTML value of the input element with a specific property within the PHP class. When the Livewire is triggered, it will make AJAX re-render the view using the new data.

Lazy updating

The lazy updating concept is used to eliminate performance constraints. Generally, Livewire will make an AJAX call after every input or change event. Although, this may cost text fields that fire rapid updates whenever there is a user input such as a search input.

In such scenarios, the lazy directive modifier can be used to make sure that the AJAX call can be made only after the user clicks away from the input.

Deferred updating 

.defer is used to cut down the network usage as it batches data and action to perform only in the next network request.

Debouncing input

After Lazy Updating and Deferred Updating, Debouncing is another method to improve the browser performance. The Debouncing method just introduces a time gap between keystrokes, say like, three seconds.

After that, the browser can only AJAX calls when the time between the two keystrokes exceeds three seconds, thus avoiding too many requests to the server. By default, Livewire applies 150ms debounce to text inputs. Although, it can be overridden by applying the .debounce modifier.

Properties that are made public on your component classes are made available to the component template view. Moreover, the value of the property is matched in real-time to the view, such that when you update the value of the property, it gets updated in the component class automatically.

Although, if you want to bind a component property to an HTML input element, you will need to use wire:model=”property name” syntax.

When you type this syntax, you will see the value of the $message getting updated in real-time. This concept of data binding is exactly the same as Vue.js, React, and Angular frameworks.

Actions of Livewire

When you can bind data in the view template to public properties of components, you can also map client-side events to methods in your components. For instance, you can answer the click events, keyup, and keydown events, and more using the methods that are defined in your component class.

Data validation

With Livewire, you can create seamless data validation. So, if you want to validate data coming from a form template view, you will need to write a $rules property that contains the validation rules, similar to the one you do in Laravel.

After that, you call the $this→validate() in the method doing the validation.

Follow the codes below to create a form for the blog post:

When the user submits the post in the above-given form code and if it doesn’t pass the validation, the validation will start displaying errors, all this is done without refreshing the page.

Conclusion

Laravel’s Livewire is a pretty useful library that acts like a bridge between the backend and frontend. Along with that, Livewire offers you a ton of benefits including real-time interactivity, without having to write a lot of JavaScript all by yourself. If you are aware of Vue.js, you will be able to know the other benefits of Livewire. In short, you can choose Laravel development company to build a server-rendered app with some reactivity to it using Livewire