The SitePoint PHP blog has kicked off another series of posts today with part one of a series looking at building an application based on the Laravel PHP framework and EmberJS.

Nowadays, everything is turning into a web application. Even simple websites have a mobile app relying on a REST Api. Web applications are accessible everywhere – on a laptop, desktop, tablet, mobile, and recently on wearable devices like smartwatches. Everything is becoming smaller and faster – front ends are becoming separated from back ends, and only communicate with the server through APIs. In this series, we are going to create a photo uploading app. For the front-end, we will use EmberJs and Foundation 5. [...] For the back-end, we will use Laravel. The source code will be available per-part, and in final shape in the final part of this series.

They go with the Laravel Homestead virtual machine (and Vagrant) to make for a quick setup and stable environment. They help you get it all set up to push up to Heroku and get all needed dependencies, both frontend and backend, installed. They also walk you through the setup of the database, configuring the connection and deploying the application to production.