AdonisJs 3.0 is out - Laravel for Node.js

Thanks for this!

Hi All,

For an upcoming project we are being forced to go the Node route and now we need to make a call on which framework to use.

Not having ANY Node experience is making the landscape hard to navigate - from the cursory glance I've given Adonis it looks very good due to it's "Laraveleusqe" nature.

@jeffrey_way / All : I would really appreciate it if we could get an informed opinion on the viability of this framework.

We're thinking along the lines of Vue on the front-end with Adonis on the backend. Does this make sense?

Thanks.

Hey @leonardharley !

Which type of information do you need? I'll be happy to answer to some of your questions.

We're thinking along the lines of Vue on the front-end with Adonis on the backend. Does this make sense?

Why this would not make sense? Front-end and back-end are different things, you can use whatever frontend framework with whatever backend technologies/frameworks.

Be wary, Adonis does look nice but it's not really battle proven yet.

Don't pick it because it's not Express or Hapi. They're both proven to work extremely well in production. Google "walmart black friday hapi".

I'm not saying don't use it but the more popular frameworks are popular for a reason.

@leonardharley Who is “forcing” you to make an application in a language and ecosystem that you (and assume team) aren’t familiar with?

@martinbean The 3rd party system we have to interface with / provide a front end GUI for has a preference for gPRC via a Node SDK.

Personally I couldn't care less what we use, it's just that I'm not familiar with the Node landscape and am looking for the "simplest learning curve, most stable framework/s (front and back) as possible". Tall order I know...

@leonardharley I’d say stick to the ecosystem you know if possible, rather than have technology choices enforced by a third party vendor. If they have a web service/API then you should be able to interface with it in any language, and not their tech stack.

@martinbean I tend to agree with you. We have an established workflow, skillset and tooling for Laravel which I'd sooner not abandon. Surely there must be a way to handle gRPC comms within Laravel although we've not researched this at all as of yet.

My concern though is we are seeing a lot of talk/noise surrounding ECMAScript 6 and how this will lead to PHP obsolence. If we have to take the hit and skillup into the Node paradigm then it would obviously be better to do it sooner rather than later.

On face value Adonis "looks" good, but since we are not Node guru's we have no way to tell if it's the right call or not. We fully understand it's new and that folks like @RomainLanz who are contributing to the project would like to push adoption - and there's nothing wrong with that at all - it's just whether Adonis will eventually get the community support it will absolutely have to have if it hopes to become the "Laravel of the Node.js world"...

ECMAScript 6 and how this will lead to PHP obsolence

@leonardharley Wut? ECMAScript has nothing to do with PHP. That’s like saying the next version of Java is going to make .NET obsolete.

@martinbean - fair comment...

However our issue is this - we need to interface with a cloud app that currently only has a NodeJS SDK...

Excuse the ignorance but our thinking is we essentially have 3 options:

1. Use a pure Node based framework like Adonis
2. Find a way to interface Laravel with the Node SDK
3. Write our own PHP based wrapper for the core gRPC calls essentially creating a PHP SDK for the cloud app in question.

Obviously each option above has pro's and cons...

1. @RomainLanz - If we were to go this route how would we integrate the Node SDK into Adonis? The pro's we see in this option are that we natively interface with the Node SDK. The con is learning Node and Adonis (although the get productive path on Adonis "should be" quicker than other options due to it's "Laravel" approach)...

2. Again - how would we go about doing this. The pro's we see are we get to stick with Laravel and use the published Node SDK.

3. We believe the pro of this option is we end up with a native PHP based SDK - the cons however are this seems to be heaviest lifting option as we have to reverse engineer the Node SDK into PHP (not even sure if this is possible).

Any comments, suggestions of recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

@leonardharley gRPC has a PHP version if you look at the repository: https://github.com/grpc/grpc

Yeah sure - however the problem is that writing our own PHP wrapper for the gRPC calls is going to be far too much heavy lifting - we've been speaking to the dev folks on the other end it's simply not going to be viable to think about doing option 3.

So that leaves us with either finding some way to interface Laravel to the NodeJS SDK or switch to a node framework.

Whilst Adonis may not be the most popular Node framework out there the design philosophy looks good, same for the documentation and the learning curve coming from Laravel should be less steep than anything else...

But why would you need to create your own wrapper if there's already an official PHP package to call gRPC?

--> https://github.com/grpc/grpc/tree/master/src/php

I've recently bumped into adonis, and oh boy, it's so based on laravel, and really liked the integration with nuxt (adonuxt), but since I've spend almost all my developer time on php, I do still get something confused with all the ES6 nuances, but I think it worth a shot

Being a front end dev working on Angular SPAs for the day job and Laravel/Angular by night for side projects, I took a look at Adonis 4 yesterday... I haven't been this excited about a new shiny thing since Laravel.

I went through some tutorials on Scotch.io and it feels like someone renamed the .php extensions to .js, I've never been more instantly comfortable with a new foreign framework out of the box.

Worth checking out especially if you find yourself more and more in the JavaScript SPA world. I hope

Adonis has made 2018 an amazing year for me.

I have been working as a dev 20+ years and have 15+ years with PHP. I've been wanting to drop PHP for awhile. The language is ugly, and the code I write with it isn't that portable. Only useful for web.

Node.js has been on my radar for awhile. JS is just awesome now. Having it on the front and back end means I write less code. A lot of the code I write is now usable on desktops with electron and for mobiles using React.JS. You write small decoupled modules, and boy, you can reuse them in so many contexts. Just powerful. Also, having my mind on JS only, instead of constantly switching between PHP and JS means I waste less time remembering how to do things. I can really learn one language in detail.

Writing JS node modules feels like writing code that will last for years to come. I never had that feeling with PHP.

I looked at Express and Koa, but went with Adonis for the projects I am working on this year. A microframework like Koa is nice since you can pick your pieces, but Adonis made a lot of good choices, so it works well for what I need at the moment. Then only thing I don't like so much is Antl, the module for translations.