Sometimes, no matter what solution you use to build your system, there comes a point where everything tends to grow a bit big and edges towards being unmanageable. Luckily Livewire offers a solution to this problem.

What is Livewire?

Laravel Livewire offers a way to build dynamic interfaces, but instead of using a JavaScript library such as Vue or React, it allows developers to write their code in PHP components and Blade template files. It’s fantastic. If you haven’t used it before then I suggest you check it out.

What is the problem?

Lots of tutorials and examples tell you how to build something small, like a contact form or a todo list. This is absolutely fine as it allows the example to show the build from start to finish, but sometimes you get given a specification for a very large and complex system and are asked to build it.

Let’s use the example of a holiday car rental site. When you want to make your booking you need to store details of the customer, such as their name and address, the type of car you want to hire, as well as any extras such as additional insurance or even hotels for your stay.

One way of approaching this would be to create a single, large component with all the logic in and then a single view file that just keeps on getting longer and longer. It will probably work just fine, but there are some tools available that let you split this up into more manageable chunks.

#laravel #livewire #php