W. Jason Gilmore - Easy Laravel 5 - A Hands On Introduction Using A Real World Project

Ive spent the vast majority of my professional career (20 years and counting) immersed in the PHP language. During this time Ive written eight PHP-related books, including a few bestsellers. Along the way Ive worked on dozens of PHP-driven applications for clients ranging from unknown startups to globally-recognized companies, penned hundreds of articles about PHP and web development for some of the worlds most popular print and online publications, and personally trained hundreds of developers on various PHP-related topics. In short, over the span of two decades Ive pretty much seen it all when it comes to PHP.

So it might come as a surprise to some that Ive never been more immersed in the language than right now. The PHP community and project ecosystem has never been stronger than it is today, offering an incredible number of libraries, frameworks, and tools which allow PHP developers to build more complicated web applications faster than they ever have before. And at least at the time of this writing there is no more popular PHP project on the planet than the Laravel framework.

Over the past several years Ive worked on multiple large Laravel projects for a variety of clientele. Among others these projects include a REST API for an incredibly popular iOS and Android app, an e-commerce application for selling subscription-based services, and a huge intranet application for a South American agricultural concern. I can say without hesitation that these projects have ranked among the most entertaining and fulfilling in my career, and that sentiment has largely to do with the incredible power and productivity Laravel bestows upon its users.

This book summarizes all of the hard-won knowledge and experience Ive amassed building these Laravel projects, and indeed that accrued building web applications of all shapes and sizes over the past two decades. By its conclusion, youll have gained a well rounded understanding of Laravels many features, and along the way will have been introduced to many best practices pertaining to code organization, testing, and deployment. I cant wait to get started!

Too many programming tutorials skew far more heavily in favor of academic exercises than real-world practicalities. Not so in this book. A significant amount of the material found herein is based upon the development of a project called HackerPair (http://hackerpair.com) which you can interact with right now by heading over to the HackerPair website (http://hackerpair.com).

HackerPair incorporates many, if not all, of the Laravel features youll want to be acquainted with when building your own applications. Ill highlight just a few of the features here. Keep in mind however that not all of these features are currently available in the beta release, although theyll be added soon!

• Comprehensive Database Seeding: Many beginning developers tend to skip over the generation of real-world data for the development environment. HackerPair includes extensive data generation scripts (known as seeds) for users, events, categories, and locations.
• Rigorous Form Integration and Validation: HackerPair uses the powerful LaravelCollective/HTML package for forms generation, and relies on formalized Laravel procedures for input validation including use of the native Laravel validators and form requests.
• Extensive Model Relationships: HackerPair offers numerous examples of model relationships by including features such as event creation (events are owned by users), event favorites (users can favorite many events), event locations (events belong to states, states have many events), and so on.
• User Authentication and Profile Management: Laravel offers great off-the-shelf support for user registration and login, however developers will quickly outgrow the defaults. HackerPair extends the registration form to include several additional fields, extensively modifies the default registration and login view formatting, and adds account profile management.
• Social Login: In addition to standard user registration and authentication, users can instead opt to login using a third-party service such as GitHub and Twitter.
• Vue.js Features: Vue.js is Laravels de facto JavaScript library. HackerPair includes a number of cool Vue.js features, including AJAX-driven event favoriting, event attendance management, and notifications.
• Bootstrap 4 Integration: Although Bootstrap 4 is still in beta at the time of this writing, I wanted to give it a spin and am glad I did. Although I will make clear Im not exactly a CSS guru, and youll probably find some of my styling to be repulsive. At any rate, in the book youll also learn how to integrate Bootstrap 3 and the new Tailwind CSS frameworks.
• Extensive Automated Testing: One of my favorite Laravel features is the practically push button automated test integration. The HackerPair project includes extensive testing of numerous aspects of the code, including unit tests, model tests, and integration tests using Laravel Dusk.
• A REST API: We want to give developers the chance to build their own cool HackerPair applications, and so have exposed a REST API which allows information about events to be retrieved for display in a variety of formats.

Best of all, all interested Laravel developers are able to peruse and download the HackerPair GitHub repository for free! Head on over to http://github.com/wjgilmore/hackerpair to view the code.

This book is broken into 12 chapters, each of which is briefly described below. Remember, the book is currently in beta, which is why not all of these chapters are included in your download! Many are under development and almost complete, so in the coming weeks Ill be regularly pushing up new versions and notifying readers.

In this opening chapter youll learn how to create and configure your Laravel project using your existing PHP development environment, a virtual machine known as Laravel Homestead, and a minimal development environment known as Valet (OSX users only). Ill also show you how to configure your environment in order to effectively debug your Laravel applications, and how to extend Laravels capabilities by installing several popular third-party packages. Well conclude the chapter with an introduction to PHPUnit, showing you how to create and execute your first automated Laravel test!

In this chapter youll learn how to create controllers and actions, and define the routes used to access your application endpoints. Youll also learn how to create the pages (views), work with variable data and logic using the Blade templating engine, and reduce redundancy using layouts and view helpers. Ill also introduce Laravel Elixir, a new feature for automating otherwise laborious tasks such as JavaScript transpiling and CSS minification. Youll also learn how to integrate several popular CSS frameworks, including Bootstrap 3 and 4, and Tailwind, and how to use Laravel Dusk for integration testing.