How Laravel Livewire works (a deep dive)

1. inertia-laravel

   1 44 2,275 9.0 PHP

   The Laravel adapter for Inertia.js.

   

   Awesome. I’m noticing a ton of “alternative” front end development tools these days: Hotwire, Stimulus Reflex, LiveView, Livewire, etc.

   However I don’t think javascript is the fundamental blocker. When people say they dislike building SPAs, they probably mean they dislike APIs and the whole circus of double validations, error catching, form handling and cache invalidations that come with a React/Vue SPA.

   Inertiajs[1] is a really solid middle ground of MVC goodness and client side interactivity.

   [1] - https://inertiajs.com

2. InfluxDB

   www.influxdata.com featured

   InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads. InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.

   

3. livewire

   2 7 22,996 9.7 PHP

   A full-stack framework for Laravel that takes the pain out of building dynamic UIs.

   

4. turbolinks

   3 2 170 0.0 JavaScript

   

   However I still need SPA navigation and although there's a Turbo adapter [0], it looks like more of a prototype at the moment.

   [0] https://github.com/livewire/turbolinks

5. django-unicorn

   4 56 2,538 8.4 Python

   The magical reactive component framework for Django ✨

   

6. jetstream

   5 24 4,043 7.4 PHP

   Tailwind scaffolding for the Laravel framework.

   

   I get your point and this conversation might be as old as Laravel itself. I would like to point out a couple of things though:

   The "hop in and be productive" part is directly related to Laravel being pretty opinionated. It's hard to have the one without the other. I think it's comparable to Steve Jobs, who had pretty strong opinions about certain things, too. The end result is a "product" that doesn't try to be the right fit for everyone.

   Livewire, just like Jetstream[1] etc. is opt-in. When Jetstream was introduced, there was quite an uproar (by parts of the community) about Laravel forcing users into Livewire or Inertia[2]. The end result was (imho) a very healthy shift in communication around it (to emphasize the opt-in part), followed by the introduction of Breeze[3], which goes to show that Taylor does recognize the reservations some people may have about those new shiny toys.

   It's a very natural thing that big projects like that will have an ever-growing feature set. That is an important part of keeping existing users excited. The Jetstream-discussion has been an important lesson for the team (I hope) and I'm glad it ended the way it did.

   You can still build your Laravel app in a pretty similar fashion as you would have done 5 years ago and if you want, you can make use of the recent additions, so I think there's not too much to worry about to be honest. If you have outgrown the magic, isn't it pretty amazing that you can drop down one level of abstraction and just use symfony? Also, do you think you would've grasped many of the underlying features of symfony, if it wasn't for Laravel's opinionated wrapping in a nicer syntax (pardon my oversimplification)?

   Nevertheless, I think it's good to keep up the warning signs and have this discussion from time to time. ;-)

   [1] https://github.com/laravel/jetstream

7. breeze

   6 19 2,966 8.1 Vue

   Minimal Laravel authentication scaffolding with Blade, Vue, or React + Tailwind. (by laravel)

   

8. htmx

   7 654 45,355 9.4 JavaScript

   </> htmx - high power tools for HTML

   

   I recently started using htmx (https://htmx.org/) in combination with Django and have become a firm believer of sending HTML 'over the wire' instead of JSON structures that then get used client side.

9. Stream

   getstream.io featured

   Stream - Scalable APIs for Chat, Feeds, Moderation, & Video. Stream helps developers build engaging apps that scale to millions with performant and flexible Chat, Feeds, Moderation, and Video APIs and SDKs powered by a global edge network and enterprise-grade infrastructure.

   

10. phoenix_live_view

    8 32 6,542 9.7 Elixir

    Rich, real-time user experiences with server-rendered HTML

    

    I feel that the simplicity of just building on the server and pushing the updates across the wire is where we are heading. So a lot less double up, with regards needing to write both for the server and client. Validation especially will just need to be written once.

    Although I do feel Phoenix Liveview is a better option because they implement sockets.

    Also saw this update today they will allow you to trigger javascript on the client without the sever round trip, it's one of the things people get a bit stuck understanding. Generally they think to pop open a modal or menu requires a round trip to the server but really you should be using Alpine.js or similar for such things. This new pending update remove the requirement of needing a framework like Alpine. https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_live_view/pull/1...

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