Laravel with React — How to Build a Web App Fast
Building a web app using Laravel with React offers a winning combination of robustness, efficiency, flexibility, and user experience. By leveraging the strengths of these technologies and their respective ecosystems, we can create a modern, scalable, and competitive web app that meets the needs and expectations of our users and stakeholders.
Build a Laravel app with React for front-end design. Create interfaces with easy-to-use coded UI components in a design tool, and then, copy them into your dev environment. Yes! It’s possible. Try UXPin Merge.
What is Laravel?
Laravel is an open-source PHP web framework designed for building modern web applications following the Model-View-Controller architectural pattern. Developed by Taylor Otwell, Laravel provides developers with a streamlined and expressive syntax, along with a comprehensive set of tools and libraries, to simplify and accelerate web development.
As a PHP framework, Laravel provides a structured and organized approach to PHP web development. It offers features such as routing, database management, templating, authentication, and more, all of which are optimized for PHP developers. By using Laravel, PHP developers can build robust and scalable web applications more efficiently, without having to reinvent the wheel or deal with low-level implementation details.
There are several alternatives to Laravel such as Symfony, Codelgniter, and more. Laravel is great for building simple, single-page web applications or enterprise-grade solutions.
Why would you use Laravel back-end?
Laravel provides a rich set of features out-of-the-box, including a powerful Object-Relational Mapping called Eloquent, an expressive query builder, routing, middleware, authentication, and authorization systems. These features allow you to focus on building your application logic rather than reinventing the wheel for common web development tasks.
The PHP framework is optimized for performance and scalability, with features such as built-in caching, queuing, and database optimization. Additionally, Laravel’s modular architecture and support for microservices and distributed systems make it suitable for building scalable and high-performance applications that can handle increased traffic and user load.
Laravel is great as a back-end for:
- Content Management Systems – Laravel provides the necessary tools for managing and presenting content efficiently.
- E-commerce platforms – developers can leverage Laravel’s integrations with popular payment gateways, such as Stripe and PayPal, to create secure shopping experiences.
- Social networking sites – Laravel provides the foundation for implementing user profiles, news feeds, messaging systems, and more.
- CRM and ERP systems – Laravel has features to manage customer data, track sales, automate business processes, and integrate with third-party services.
- API-driven applications – Laravel’s built-in support for API development, including RESTful API and JSON API resources, makes it well-suited for building API-driven applications.
- Job boards and platforms: Laravel is a great framework for managing job listings, handling user registrations and profiles, and automating notifications and reminders.
- Portals: Engineers can leverage Laravel’s authentication and authorization systems to manage user access, track performance, and deliver personalized experiences.
Why would you pair Laravel with React?
Pairing Laravel with React offers a powerful combination of robust back-end functionality and dynamic front-end interactivity. React’s component-based approach allows for modular and reusable UI development, seamlessly integrating with Laravel’s backend logic. In that vein, there are a few reasons why developers opt for Laravel React combination:
Enhanced User Experience
React’s component-based architecture and virtual DOM enable the creation of interactive and dynamic user interfaces. By integrating React with Laravel, you can build a modern and responsive frontend that enhances the user experience, providing seamless navigation, real-time updates, and rich interactive features.
Optimized Performance
React’s efficient rendering and virtual DOM reconciliation algorithm result in faster rendering and improved performance, especially for complex and data-intensive applications. By offloading the UI rendering to the client-side with React, you can reduce server load and enhance overall application responsiveness.
Decoupled Frontend and Backend
Pairing Laravel with React enables you to adopt a decoupled architecture, where the frontend and backend are separate and communicate via Laravel API. This separation of concerns allows for greater flexibility, scalability, and maintainability, as changes to one part of the application do not affect the other. It also facilitates parallel development, allowing frontend and backend teams to work independently and focus on their respective areas of expertise.
Scalability and Performance
Separating the frontend and backend allows you to scale each part of the application independently based on demand. You can deploy additional frontend servers or leverage content delivery networks (CDNs) to distribute static assets efficiently. This scalability ensures that your application can handle increased traffic and user load without sacrificing performance or responsiveness.
Code Reusability
React’s component-based architecture promotes code reusability, allowing you to create reusable UI components that can be shared across different parts of your application. By building reusable components with React, you can reduce development time, minimize code duplication, and maintain consistency across your application’s UI.
Rich Ecosystem and Tooling
React’s extensive ecosystem and tooling provide a wealth of libraries, frameworks, and development tools to streamline frontend development. You can leverage tools like Create React App, React Router, and Redux to scaffold projects, manage routing, and handle state management efficiently. Additionally, React’s vibrant community and ecosystem ensure long-term support, stability, and compatibility for your frontend development needs.
Single Page Applications
React is well-suited for building single-page applications that provide a seamless and immersive user experience. By pairing Laravel with React, you can create SPAs that load dynamically and handle navigation and state changes gracefully, without requiring full-page reloads. This results in a more fluid and responsive user experience, similar to that of a native desktop or mobile application.
How to pair Laravel with React Quickly
If you want to start a new Laravel project, you need to start by brainstorming what kind of features and functionalities you want your Laravel application to have. Then, begin by creating layouts. You can use UXPin Merge for that part.
UXPin Merge is a powerful UI builder that allows you to drag and drop coded React components to build interactive, production-ready React interfaces. You can use one of the built-in libraries such as Material UI, Bootstrap or Ant design or bring your own Javascript library to the tool.
You can use ready React components such as data tables, buttons, menus, footers, and build an app 8.6x faster than with other tools.
This eliminates the need of setting up a project step-by-step, as your UI project comes preconfigured when copying it from UXPin Merge. To learn about the full process, watch our webinar about using Laravel with React.
