Laravel

Coming from a non-web development environment background, I was a bit lost a first and bewildered by all the varying tools and platforms, and spent much too long evaluating before eventualy deciding on Laravel as the main core of my development.

But as I started development with Laravel that lead me into discovering Vue.js for creating beautiful front-end components that were easy to configure and extend, so I decided to standardise on Vue.js for most of my front-end development.

During my search for additional Vue.js components, a chance comment in a @laravel forum , led me to discover Quasar Framework initially for it's wide range of in-built components ... but once, I realised that Quasar Framework allowed me to use the same codebase to create apps for SPA, PWA, iOS, Android, and Electron then I was hooked.

So, I'm now using mainly just Quasar Framework for all the front-end, with Laravel providing a backend API service to the Front-end apps.

I'm deploying this all to DigitalOcean droplets via service called Moss.sh which deploys my private GitHub repositories directly to DigitalOcean in realtime.

Back at the start of 2017, we decided to create a web-based tool for the SEO OnPage analysis of our clients' websites. We had over 2.000 websites to analyze, so we had to perform thousands of requests to get every single page from those websites, process the information and save the big amounts of data somewhere.

Very soon we realized that the initial chosen script language and database, PHP, Laravel and MySQL, was not going to be able to cope efficiently with such a task.

By that time, we were doing some experiments for other projects with a language we had recently get to know, Go , so we decided to get a try and code the crawler using it. It was fantastic, we could process much more data with way less CPU power and in less time. By using the concurrency abilites that the language has to offers, we could also do more Http requests in less time.

Unfortunately, I have no comparison numbers to show about the performance differences between Go and PHP since the difference was so clear from the beginning and that we didn't feel the need to do further comparison tests nor document it. We just switched fully to Go.

There was still a problem: despite the big amount of Data we were generating, MySQL was performing very well, but as we were adding more and more features to the software and with those features more and more different type of data to save, it was a nightmare for the database architects to structure everything correctly on the database, so it was clear what we had to do next: switch to a NoSQL database. So we switched to MongoDB, and it was also fantastic: we were expending almost zero time in thinking how to structure the Database and the performance also seemed to be better, but again, I have no comparison numbers to show due to the lack of time.

We also decided to switch the website from PHP and Laravel to JavaScript and Node.js and ExpressJS since working with the JSON Data that we were saving now in the Database would be easier.

As of now, we don't only use the tool intern but we also opened it for everyone to use for free: https://tool-seo.com

For your purposes, I recommend @Laravel, or even @Symfony or @Yii, or whatever. In your use case, a framework is 100% indicated, because it will cut your boilerplate in half or more, and you'll have a pre-fab organization for files, classes and so on. Personally, I am not a fan of Frameworks, because they tend to take over your project like cancer and trap you. But for an internal app to manage stuff, it's probably the best idea to use one (preferably one you like).

When doing internal apps, your best bet is to stick the essentials and basics, try Laravel with MySQL on a nice Debian virtual machine. Can't go wrong.

I use Laravel because it's the most advances PHP framework out there, easy to maintain, easy to upgrade and most of all : easy to get a handle on, and to follow every new technology ! PhpStorm is our main software to code, as of simplicity and full range of tools for a modern application.

Google Analytics Analytics of course for a tailored analytics, Bulma as an innovative CSS framework, coupled with our Sass (Scss) pre-processor.

As of more basic stuff, we use HTML5, JavaScript (but with Vue.js too) and Webpack to handle the generation of all this.

To deploy, we set up Buddy to easily send the updates on our nginx / Ubuntu server, where it will connect to our GitHub Git private repository, pull and do all the operations needed with Deployer .

CloudFlare ensure the rapidity of distribution of our content, and Let's Encrypt the https certificate that is more than necessary when we'll want to sell some products with our Stripe api calls.

Asana is here to let us list all the functionalities, possibilities and ideas we want to implement.

This is my stack in Application & Data

JavaScript PHP HTML5 jQuery Redis Amazon EC2 Ubuntu Sass Vue.js Firebase Laravel Lumen Amazon RDS GraphQL MariaDB

My Utilities Tools

Google Analytics Postman Elasticsearch

My Devops Tools

Git GitHub GitLab npm Visual Studio Code Kibana Sentry BrowserStack

My Business Tools

Slack

This week, we finally released NurseryPeople.com. In the end, I chose to provision our server on DigitalOcean. So far, I am SO happy with that decision. Although setting everything up was a challenge, and I learned a lot, DigitalOceans blogs helped in so many ways. I was able to set up nginx and the Laravel web app pretty smoothly. I am also using Buddy for deploying changes made in git, which is super awesome. All I have to do in order to deploy is push my code to my private repo, and buddy transfers everything over to DigitalOcean. So far, we haven't had any downtime and DigitalOceans prices are quite fair for the power under the hood.