I'm relatively new to practical web development, so I apologize if the question is stupid. The crux of the problem: I only want to use Vue on the front end of the site, and on the back I am using a PHP framework (or not a framework, it doesn't matter). Connecting Vue to every page via a CDN seems to be wrong to me. I didn't quite understand how the CLI works, does it generate some kind of static files (like a compiler), or does it definitely need Node? And did I understand correctly that I can't use things like Vuex and vue-router without node.js? Thank you in advance!
VueJS and vue-router are totally independent JavaScript framework and router, you do not need NodeJs to use them, you might get confused after using npm but npm is just a package manager, using it is a matter of choice.
The ClI or currently #vue/cli is just a command line that you can use to create new projects and control them, run them etc, using it isn't required when using vue trough a CDN.
About PHP:
There are a lot of ways to use VueJs in PHP but the most convenient one would be creating a PHP API in the back-end and a normal Vue and Axios app in the front-end, this approach is the one you should get used too because its easily implemented in other languages and even PHP frameworks, for example WordPress.
I am looking to implement Angular2 inside my current Laravel project. I've read about many setups including AngularClass's version with Webpack, but I feel like it's all over-complicated.
What I wish to make:
A simple single page app inside my Laravel app.
It needs to have something like Grunt/Gulp or even Webpack to compile upon changes.
Does not need NodeJs to run in production, no lite-server, just like AngularJS it can be injected and that's it.
I need to understand the implementation files to achieve this, so no starterpack or angular-cli, unless if you can supply good arguments.
Looking for a "how to"-like example on creating the above.
Thanks in advance.
EDIT: More information
As ANKH pointed out, i needed a more detailed and coursed question. So here we go:
- Looking for a example implementation of a Angular2 based SPA inside an existing PHP application (Laravel).
- I've tried many different tutorials, going from the heroes tour, to Sitepoint and AngularCLI based tutorials, but they all assume a SPA on it's own. Ergo, they are compiled and served through NodeJS, which I don't need.
Turns out that I've actually been looking at this entirely wrong. I've gone with using Angular-cli and found that I could generate the output files and include these inside my Laravel project. No need to integrate them further.
I'm using some open source code to launch a game. The game is old, around 11yrs. It is a tick based web based game. It's written in php and using MySQL. Basically I want to port this game to ios, instead of using uiwebview I want to build native controls.
I know that it's bad practice to communicate directly with MySQL from an ios app. So what I want to do is add a RESTful API. I'm new to this and have scoured google for answers, does anyone have any pointers of where to start when adding an API to an existing site? It's quite a complex structure.
Thanks.
Paul.
My suggestion is using a framework that is guided towards building an API. I use Slim Framework for my API back end and it's pretty easy to use. If you create a separate URL for this API or include directly into the PHP project as a class it could work.
Some tutorials to get you started are
Say Hello World with Slim
RESTful services with jQuery, PHP and the Slim Framework
Writing a RESTful Web Service with Slim
Hope this helps,
Wes
I have never used a PHP framework before and am considering using Symfony for my next one. However, I have already built an API which has all my main classes. I will therefore connect to this API using CURL. Can anyone advise on where to start with such a project. I am working through a Symfony tutorial but none of it seems to apply to what I need to do as I do not need to create database connections or classes as I will be building this project on my existing API.
If you don't need a lot of what you see in the Symfony tutorials you might be able to get away with Silex. Silex is a mini-framework with alot of the core aspects of Symfony, but without the extra stuff.
http://silex.sensiolabs.org/
I'm writing an iPhone app as a hobby project and it will need a web service to provide it with data. It's not very different from what I do at work, but at work I only write views and controllers. Someone else is responsible for writing the model and usually the clients provide the web service.
I have done some web programming before, back when everyone were using MySQL and PHP, so my skills are a bit outdated, but I'm confident that I would be able to pull it of using the techniques I already know. However, I don't want to waste my time using obsolete tools. I've figured out that the state of the art would be to write a REST API. I was thinking that there should be some pretty good frameworks out there that pretty much just gives you a REST API with CRUD functionality as soon as you've defined a model.
I guess my question is: What would be the fastest way to get a REST API up and running? I really just want to focus on writing the iPhone app and not spend too much time on this API. It would be great if I could get web administration and revision history too. I should also add that the API isn't supposed to be public, so support for authentication would be great as well.
Just to be clear. I wouldn't mind a PHP framework. In fact it could possibly be better since I know that my current hosting supports it.
EDIT:
The links below which apparently were good for 3 years are no longer working so I went and found a couple of new tutorials that I think are going to stick around for a while. These are on the Ray Wenderlich site, a very well respected ios dev tutorial site. The first article actually references the broken links below but it is complete within itself:
How To Write A Simple PHP/MySQL Web Service for an iOS App
and the second one has a little twist to it. It used parse.com on the backend and AFNetworking. Both of which are quite excellent.
How To Synchronize Core Data with a Web Service – Part 1
I have fixed the broken links below by finding the articles in the way back machine. People seem to like the links so I will keep them. The links above should provide more food for thought.
I am doing exactly the same thing with my iphone app. I found this article on building a RESTful API in PHP:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130910164802/http://www.gen-x-design.com/archives/create-a-rest-api-with-php/
and there is also a followup article here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130323001500/http://www.gen-x-design.com/archives/making-restful-requests-in-php/
with a link to source code at the bottom of the article.
I have programmed a REST API in ZEND Framework using the Zend_Rest_Controller, on the iPhone I used ASIHTTPRequest. My experience with both where good. At the beginning I had some trouble setting up ZEND and connecting it to mySQL, but once I figured out how to do it I was able to write the API very quickly. I can share more information with you if you have any further questions.
EDIT: There seems to be no official documentation on Zend_Rest_Controller. This link describes how to use it to create your API. You simply have to disable rendering in the init() of your subclass and implement the methods for each REST call.
Just to let you know:
I ended up using Ruby on Rails.
EDIT: Since this answer has been downvoted for not providing the reason behind choosing Ruby on Rails and also no instructions on how to write a REST API with it, I thought I would give you my motivation and some simple instructions.
I started reading a book about Ruby on Rails and realized that all I needed to do was to use scaffolding and I got a JSON REST API for free.
Here's a good guide to get you started: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html
When you have your Ruby on Rails environment up and running, creating your REST API isn't harder than running:
$ rails generate scaffold Post name:string title:string content:text
(Example from the above link.) I also found that Rails is very easy and free to deploy to heroku, which meant that I didn't have to pay for hosting for my very basic, low traffic, REST API. There are many other reasons why I am very happy to work with Ruby on Rails, but that's beyond the context of this question.
I followed a quite simple tutorial for creating RESTful APIs with PHP:
Corey Maynard - Creating a RESTful API with PHP
The main concept includes:
one abstract class that handles the parsing of the URI and returning the response, and
one concrete class that consists of just the endpoints for the API.
What about Python?
I'd use Python, Django and Piston.
I'd generate Django models from your
existent DB using inspectdb.
Add the Django admin to your models.
Add Django Piston to your app.
Profit.
With no experience with Python or Django probably it'll take you a day to develop this solution and all code is unit tested and proved to work.
If you want to use PHP I recommend using the CodeIgniter framework with Phil Sturgeon's REST server:
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/working-with-restful-services-in-codeigniter-2
https://github.com/philsturgeon/codeigniter-restserver
Checkout the following PHP class that follows MVC.
http://www.phpclasses.org/package/5080-PHP-Implement-REST-Web-services-servers.html
Hope this helps.
If you already know PHP, there's nothing wrong with a PHP/MySQL backend. You can send all responses in iPhone-compatible plist xml format, and instantly turn the response into a NSDictionary/NSArray/NSNumber data structure with this short snippet of code:
NSString *response = [request responseString];
NSData* plistData = [response dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
NSPropertyListFormat format;
NSString *errorStr;
NSDictionary* plist = [NSPropertyListSerialization propertyListFromData:plistData
mutabilityOption:NSPropertyListImmutable
format:&format
errorDescription:&errorStr];
I also use the ASIHTTP package for forming URLs, sending asynchronous requets, and receiving the responses, I highly recommend it:
http://allseeing-i.com/ASIHTTPRequest/
You should use whatever languages you are comfortable with for the web service. Any language that can formulate REST responses to requests is fine.
That said, if you want to get something running quickly, I suggest using Python on Google App Engine. It's free and you can use Java instead of Python if you so desire. App Engine supports authentication using OpenID and/or Google Accounts (not sure if they're mutually exclusive) so that should make things easier to code.
As far as making the requests on the iOS device, I suggest using ASIHTTPRequest.
Another option is restSQL, an ultra-lightweight persistence framework. See http://restsql.org. It supports MySQL and PostgreSQL and runs in a standard Java EE container, e.g. Apache Tomcat.
restSQL is a very unconventional data access layer. restSQL is not an object-oriented view of the database. It presents flat or hierarchical "views" of relational database tables. These views are query-able and updatable through a simple REST-based HTTP or Java API. The HTTP interface is based on REST principles, which use HTTP’s built-in features, rather than abstracting away from them.
You want a 'REST API with CRUD functionality' and that's exactly restSQL's sweet spot. You could do this with no code. Simply define your SQL Resources via XML files and start doing HTTP calls against them with full CRUD capability.