The Laravel News site has posted the latest in their "Building a Laravel Translation Package" series of tutorials with a new post focusing on the frontend and getting it connected to the backend functionality.

In the last installment of this series, we talked through the process of manipulating the translations in our application’s language files into a format where we are now in a position to start interacting with them. In this article, we’ll be wiring up the frontend ready to start building out the user interface which will aid users with the process of translation management.

The UI will be developed using the community favorites, Tailwind CSS and Vue.js.

The tutorial starts with the approach for the functionality, taking a more hybrid approach and using a balance of backend and frontend for the majority of the functionality. It then starts in on the technical parts to connect the two halves:

• adding the required routes
• creating the controllers
• building out the views to render the interface

The majority of the post is then dedicated to the creation of the assets - the Javascript and CSS - to create the "framework" the functionality will use to work with the translations.

On his Medium.com site, Adnan Ahmed has shared some of his thoughts about being a modern backend developer in 2018. In it he talks about the current state of backend development and makes some recommendations for those wanting to get started.

Web development today is completely different from what it was a few years ago; there are lots of different things that can easily baffle anyone entering into the web development. It was one of the reasons that we decided to make these step by step visual guides demonstrating the bigger picture and to give anyone a clear idea about what they have to follow to be in certain roles in web development.

The post starts with a large infographic showing the basic steps and some of the related technologies and concepts to go with them. Following this they break it down into more detail in a text form with summaries attached for each. There are a lot of topics in the list (24 of them) but here's some of the highlights:

• Learn a Language
• Learn a Package Manager
• Standards and Best Practices
• Security
• ?Learn about the Relational [and NoSQL] Databases
• Learning a Framework
• Caching
• RESTful APIs
• Different Auth Methods
• GraphQL [and Graph Databases]

His final recommendation is one that's good for beginners and veterans in the software development world alike: "keep exploring". If you stop learning and stop trying new things you'll stagnate in your own work and career. Challenge yourself to learn something new - a new language, tool or technique - as often as possible and apply it to your work.

In a post to his site Sergey Zhuk shares his opinion on asynchronous PHP and why it's in such demand these days in web-based applications.

Asynchronous programming is on demand today. Especially in web-development where responsiveness of the application plays a huge role. No one wants to waste their time and to wait for a freezing application, while you are performing some database queries, sending an email or running some other potentially long-running tasks.

Users want to receive responses to their actions, and they want these responses immediately. When your application becomes slow, you start losing your clients. Once a user has to deal with a freezing application, in most cases he or she simply closes it and never returns. When the UI freezes from the user’s point of view, it is not clear if your application is broken, or it is performing some long-running task and requires some time for it.

He goes on to talk about the importance of responsiveness in web applications and clearing up the difference between running tasks in parallel and running them asynchronously. He also talks briefly about the use of asynchronous processing on the backend and how it compares to other technology (like Node.js and Go) that have built-in asynchronous processing.

The Laravel News site has posted the second part of their tutorial covering the creation of a Laravel-based single page application with Vue.js. This latest tutorial picks up from part one and covers data loading and error handling.

In this tutorial, we continue Building a Vue single-page application (SPA) with Laravel by learning how to load async data from a Laravel API endpoint inside a Vue component. We will also look at error handling when an API response returns an error and how to respond in the interface.

[...] To keep the server-side data simple, our API will use fake data. In Part 3, we will convert the API to a controller with test data coming from a database.

The tutorial starts with the definition of a "users" API route and an update to the API route configuration to map the routes to the correct controllers. Next comes the frontend functionality to load in the user data with the addition of the "users" route to the current Vue.Router instance. The UsersIndex component is then added with the template and functionality to request the data from the backend API. Some final changes are made to the route handling and error handling is added for when the data loading has issues, relaying an error message back to the user.

Christoph Rumpel has a post to his site sharing the process he followed in migrating his blog site from Jekyll to Laravel. Jekyll is a Ruby based static site generator rather than a dynamic solution like Laravel provides.

One of my resolutions for 2017 was to redesign my blog. One week before the new year I faced myself with the challenge and thought to myself if this was still doable. Somehow I managed it and here it is. In this article I will explain the process and show you how I redesigned the blog with Tailwind CSS and moved it from Jekyll to Laravel with keeping almost the same performance.

He then walks through the entire process, breaking it down into a few different sections:

• How to start
• The backend stack
• Toughest decisions are the ones about design
• Tailwind CSS
• Make it fast

For each of the sections there's code, screenshots and links to other resources included.

On his site today Gonzalo Ayuso has a tutorial posted showing how to create authentication in OpenUI5 applications with the help of Lumen, Amazon Cognito and JWTs.

Today I want to create an UI5/OpenUI5 boilerplate that plays with Lumen backends. Simple, isn’t it? We only need to create a Lumen API server and connect our OpenUI5 application with this API server. But today I also want to create a Login also. The typical user/password input form. I don’t want to build it from scratch (a user database, oauth provider or something like that). Since this days I’m involved with Amazon AWS projects I want to try Amazon Cognito.

He then walks through the Cognito service and what it has to offer including user management and authentication handling. He starts with the OpenUI5 side, creating the basic application and login handling via the Congnito Javascript SDK. He then modifies this with some basic user handling and creates the view for the login form. He also includes functionality for password resets and the code required to inject the JWT into every request post-authentication.

The TutsPlus.com site has posted the second part of their series covering the creation of a React application with a Laravel backend. In part one of the series they started in on some of the setup for the application. In part two continues down that path and shows how to set up React and integrate it with the Laravel backend.

In the previous tutorial, we developed a Laravel application that responds to API calls. We created routes, a controller, and a model for the simple product listing application. Since it was the controller's job to return a response to the HTTP requests, the view section was entirely skipped.

[...] In this tutorial, we will be shifting our focus towards the front end. The first half of the tutorial is about setting up React in a Laravel environment. I will also introduce you to Laravel Mix (supported by Laravel 5.4 and later), which is an API for compiling assets. In the second half of the tutorial, we will start building a React application from scratch.

The tutorial walks through the the use of the Laravel artisan command to help with some of the setup tasks and the creation of some of the initial templates and Javascript files. Then it starts in on the application itself including the display of product data and functionality to add a new project.

The TutsPlus.com site has continued their "Building Your Startup" series with this new article enhancing the application they've already created to send requests for scheduling changes.

As the Meeting Planner alpha testing phase began, the clearest feature gap was the inability to change a meeting after it had been scheduled. It's not an easy problem. Is it okay to just change a meeting without a participant's permission? Or should you ask? Or do either, depending on your role in organizing the meeting? What if you just want to ask if it's okay to meet 15 minutes later—that should be easy, right?

Solving all this required some reflecting on the social aspects of adjusting a meeting. Over time, I realized that the ability to adjust meetings easily after they've been scheduled could make or break the Meeting Planner brand.

He then starts out by describing the "tall mountain to climb" in the number of changes to backend, frontend and UX/UI functionality required to add the feature. He includes all of the code changes and additions that need to be made including:

• migrations to add new tables
• UI updates to add options for rescheduling requests
• form changes
• handling request submissions

Each point on the list includes code, screenshots and anything else that was required to make the update.

The Symfony Finland site has posted a new tutorial showing you how you can share state in a Symfony application between Twig, React and other Javascript-based applications.

Front end development has certainly grown up in the last few years. UI logic is increasingly being moved to the client side, but the traditional server-rendered views aren't going anywhere soon. And they shouldn't.

The two methods will live alongside each other and you'll have to work with two worlds. Let's explore an idea how to make this pleasant to work with, by sharing state between Twig templates and JavaScript.

The post starts with some background on a case where this kind of sharing was a requirement and, while the initial version was scrapped, a prototype application was born. He details what this prototype showcases (which JS libraries) and links to the Javascript involved over on GitHub. They then get into the code examples showing the creation of an AppState object that handles the serializing of the state information and store the result in the database via a Doctrine connection. This value is then output to the pages that require it, making it available to the frontend application (Vue.js, React or plain Javascript).

The Laravel News site has posted an interesting tutorial where they describe the use of WordPress as a backend for a Laravel application. This setup is based on the Laravel News' own experience with it in the recent refactoring of the site.

Last week I relaunched Laravel News, and the new site is running on Laravel with WordPress as the backend. I’ve been using WordPress for the past two years, and I’ve grown to enjoy the features that it provides. The publishing experience, the media manager, the mobile app, and Jetpack for tracking stats.

I wasn’t ready to give these features up, and I didn’t have the time to build my own system, so I decided to keep WordPress and just use an API plugin to pull all the content I needed out, then store it in my Laravel application. In this tutorial, I wanted to outline how I set it all up.

While he did find other methods for linking the two, they didn't quite fit with what he wanted so he worked up his own. The content is then synced via a recurring task pulling over posts, categories and tags. He gets into the WordPress REST API first, showing the extraction of the posts from the API and pushing them into a Laravel collection. There's also an example of how to sync a post with the database (API) and how to create a new post in a similar way. Also included is the code to get the featured image, get the category for a post and sync the tag values. The tutorial finishes with the code for the sync command and pushing it into the scheduler.