spatie.be VS API Platform

How do you debug your code in PHP? Do you use var_dump or dd in Laravel? Many of us also use logger to log output & figure out the problem in multiple steps. Spatie built a debugging tool called Ray that one can use to simplify the operation over dd or logger.

When in comes to Laravel packages, the guys at Spatie are probably the kings. They have hundreds of free packages you can pick from and use into your projects. Hats down for their commitment and contribution to this beautiful ecosystem.

In this article, we'll be using the Laravel Permission package from Spatie.

I'm thinking to make it as a software license, one-time payment with one year updates, as spatie.be do.

Ray by Spatie - Debugger tool

We use Oh Dear from spatie.be to check availability, dead links, certs and more for our critical FQDNs. Works perfectly fine. we also see it as a way to give something back to them in return for all their hard work in maintaining their open-source packages for Laravel.

The guys behind it work at Spatie[1] which you have probably heard of some of their packages, and Freek has a blog[2] that has a lot of PHP stuff on - lots Laravel, and lots just general new language stuff (covering PHP8 features etc)

[1] https://spatie.be

Spatie (https://spatie.be) makes a lot of great packages for Laravel. It also has a website with video courses and the code is open-sourced here https://github.com/spatie/spatie.be. I’ve learned a lot about testing from Spatie packages.

So I along with my colleague M H Hasib started working on a project of our own inspired from the API of laravel-permissions package by Spatie and the result was mongoose-permissions package.

Examples would be something like spatie.be, beyondco.de, and serversforhackers.com

Probably API-platform. The website is down at the moment, but: https://github.com/api-platform/api-platform It's Symfony based (and plays nice in that ecosystem), also allows you to describe entities via Schema org vocab, has a client generator, and comes with docker-compose and helm charts. I've used it extensively to build various headless services. It's really easy to expose annotated Doctrine entities.

API Platform is a framework for API-first projects, built on top of Symfony components. Let's see how to create a minimal and lightweight starter project in just 5 minutes!

Just use a nice framework like Symfony and for an API there is a nice thing called API Platform

On the Symfony side, a headless API can be built really quickly with https://api-platform.com/. You describe your domain entities with Schema.org vocabulary, can use a client generator to hammer out a UI in Next, Nuxt, Quasar, or whatever as a starter, it comes with an admin backend, and a Helm chart to deploy on Kubernetes. Works great for APIs when paired with, say Nuxt SSGs/PWAs if you want more of a JAMstack approach.

It could be implemented with STOMP, or Mercure (goes well with API-Platform, written in PHP/Symfony), you could write your own with the help of nchan and scale it via Redis. If it's a web service, the best practices for operating and scaling are well established, Godot then just becomes another client.

Why would someone use this over API Platform?

That looks like out-of-the-box api-platform. It even auto-updates the data on screen, no JS needed. Pretty powerful stuff and if it can be done in PHP, it can be done in other language.