1 => Choosing A Project

-

This Series

This series is intended to outline my development of an application and what I have learned about Laravel in the process. At the beginning of the project I have little to zero experience using the Laravel PHP framework, and so the project described in this entry will hopefully provide me ample opportunities to learn about how the framework works while implementing best practices.

The Project

First I have to decide on a project idea. This is often one of the most challenging parts of any learning journey. The project has to be built using Laravel, a modern and open source php web framework.

Opening Laravel for the first time felt a bit overwhelming as the amount of boilerplate code was significantly more than I initially expected. The other main backend technology I've been learning at the moment is Apollo Server, which has zero boilerplate code when you start your project.

Potential Project Ideas

Before proceeding I have laid out some of the potential ideas I had for projects, however only one can be selected.

  • Something COVID-19 related. SARS-COV2 is a popular subject topic right now.
  • A todo list with added functionality
  • Blogging platform
  • Chatroom
  • Game of life with saved seeds that people can view and play with
  • KANBAN application

Decision

The application I intend to build is a KANBAN board application. I frequently find myself using KANBAN boards for structuring my workflow for university work and it will not only provide me space to test my backend learning but it will likely require a significant amount of JavaScript code to operate the frontend. This topic will also require the use of AJAX meaning I can learn how to set up REST APIs that don't depend on forms, allowing me to build an application that updates in real time.

If you are reading this and don't know what a KANBAN board is then I recommend this resource from Atlassian that provides an excellent explanation.

Concluding Remarks

Before continuing I have to do some design work so I can have a structured approach. Each feature will be implemented as I learn as it forces me to problem solve, as opposed to following a tutorial example from start to finish. This approach forces me to understand and learn what I am doing as I go as opposed to blindly following an example without being required to develop a sound understanding. The first topic I will look into is how to render views, components and templates. You can read more about the work and application developed by reading through the following blog entries.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

8 => Gates & Authorization Policies

-
Image
Determining whether or not a user is allowed to perform a certain action is an important aspect of building a CMS. It provides users with ownership of their data, preventing other users from performing CRUD functionality on data that should be hidden from them. This is more commonly referred to as authorization. Laravel accomplishes this job by using gates and/or policies . This blog entry will cover how gates are used in the KANBAN application. Only one example will be covered as the process is the same for creating different gates for different actions. Workflow There are multiple steps involved when attempting to secure actions. There are shortcuts that can be taken to reduce the number of these steps however in doing so the applications logic becomes less manageable as some methods could become 'fat'. This makes the code harder to understand. Initially the developer should create a security policy, these are stored in app_route/app/Policies and follow the xPolicy.php conven...
Read more

4 => Views - Templates, Components & Pagination

-
Image
This blog entry will discuss views, more specifically Blade Templates, and how I implemented pagination. The creation of views, templates and dynamically rendering content for the client will be covered throughout this entry. I'll also discuss some of the problems I faced while attempting to use views and how I overcame those problems. Views In its most basic description, views are what the customer is served, it is the HTML page that the customer interacts with on their client. Laravels Blade files provide functionality that vanilla php can provide however it provides a consistent and straightforward method in doing so. An example of this is @foreach loops and the displaying of error messages using @error. Laravel allows for views to be constructed in several ways. Vanilla php ( You are not forced to use .blade.php files ) Laravel Blade templates Plain HTML ( Doing this you lose most of the functionality php provides however if a page is static and the content never changes this i...
Read more

5 => User Accounts & Authentication

-
Image
Implementing Authentication In Laravel This entry to the blog will explain how I personally went about adding authentication into an existing application along with the issues I faced. I'll be covering both the good and bad, what I found intuitive and where I feel that Laravel could potentially improve and why. Database Table Structure So far the project already has a users table that were generated by default. This table is already suitable providing the appliation what it requires for authentication, the application just needs the logic for authentication. Each users table has the following general structure : The following is an example of some data that has been generated with Faker through the use of Factories( you can read more about factories in blog #6 ). You'll notice that every password is identical, at the moment as they are hardcoded. The pre-hashed version of the password is the word 'password' so that while testing functionality I don't need to rememb...
Read more