Dream Gears 2018 Edition
2018-09-21 11:02:42 dream-2018
At the time of this writing we have launched the 2018 edition of the Dream Gears website. This site was made with Laravel 5.3 on the server side, and mostly Bootstrap on the client side with bit of Vue.js and jQuery. The inspiration behind making this new version was mostly to practice the aforementioned development tools, and I am very happy with the results.
I had been working with the same clients for many years on particular ongoing projects, and hadn't really needed to explore outside of my usual toolkit. But recently a lot of wells went dry and things just changed so much in my life, causing me to get back into the freelance game. As you poke around the job listings these days it's quite different from what it used to be. Where once we had a lot of generic "PHP Programmer Wanted" listings, we now have a lot more specific titles such as "Laravel Experted Needed". Laravel is a framework for the PHP language which facilitates a lot of common web application features. For example you can create a complex form which operates with a database to save, edit, and delete information in just a few steps. With experience you can probably have it done within an hour. Setting up a registration and login interface takes no time at all, just type a command and it creates all the files and operations you need.
One thing I don't really like about Laravel is the file structure. To make a new app you have to manage a Controller file, a View file, a Route file, and often open up many other files along the way to make things work. That is a bit annoying to deal with, but I guess it is a small sacrifice considering how much Laravel gives back in terms of usage.
The site only took a few days time to complete with these convenient tools. Bootstrap is a no brainer, I will be using it for all of my future web dev projects. Bootstrap is also a sort of framework which mitigates a ton of CSS work for page layouts and overall design. Although it doesn't seem to cover all design issues I can think of, because there are a lot, but as far as making a nice uniform layout with buttons and HTML components all ready to go - it's a very handy tool to keep nearby.
Vue.js is also a framework, this one is for JavaScript. It is not as popular as Angular or React, but it is gaining popularity exponentially and I personally give it a thumbs up. I see it as being very useful for a lot of front end design functionality. Basically, you can easily add some code to HTML elements and assign them functionality with JavaScript. This makes it really easy to code repetitive tasks, and you can also swap out information of elements at lightning speed, and with little effort.
That's all for today. More to come soon. Perhaps a bit more in-depth and interesting stuff next time.
