Roast is on Laravel 5.6!

Today we have brought roastandbrew.coffee to the newest Laravel technology available! As of today, all of the articles in the course on API Driven Development with Laravel and VueJS have been updated for Laravel 5.6 installation and features. The application itself is running Laravel 5.6 in production as well. The biggest update to the code besides the framework is we are running the newest version of Laravel Passport which provides enhanced security to the API side of the application.

What's Next?

There's a lot of features in the application itself that are coming up that make it more useful for the coffee enthusiast. With more features come more use cases and more tutorials. From here on out, each tutorial will make sense in the use case of the application, but also be extracted and generic enough to be used in any application. I feel that some of the later articles in the course, though helpful, have been strictly bound to roastandbrew.coffee.

Revisiting Tags

In the course I dive in depth on how to do a tagging structure with Laravel and VueJS. It works, but without a good UX and a proper use case. We will be re-visiting the tagging structure and updating previous tutorials so it not only makes more sense, but able to use in your own application.

Logos For Cafes

With logos come images. Images are always fun to deal with, but doing them through an AJAX/API method just add to the excitement. I've already written a simple course: Your Guide To Uploading Files with VueJS and Axios which focuses mainly on the front end of the application. In API Driven Development with Laravel and VueJS , I'll focus more on how to handle these images from an API side such as resizing, storing, retrieving, and updating.

Friends and Profiles

Everyone loves a pal to go to a coffee shop with! We will be adding a simple friend/profile system to find pals to hit up new coffee shops with, or find people with similar tastes to yours and coffee shops that they like. These kind of implementations require a lot of testing and a few Eloquent relationship tricks. I will be diving into these in detail but in a way that you can implement it in your own app!

Notifications

Laravel offers some awesome notification features that we will be implementing. In Roast, we will work on notifying users when a new coffee shop is added in their area or if they get a recommendation for a coffee shop. This will happen after the friends and profiles feature and tutorial.

The API Driven Development Course and Book

Roast and Brew is a way of sharing the power of an API Driven Application. It's beautiful, simple, and an awesome example. However, we have much bigger plans in the works! I've been referencing a book about API Driven Development and I'd like to give a quick teaser to what some of the more indepth articles and features that will be included in the course and book.

Cordova

The power of API Driven Development comes into play when you wish to consume your API from multiple sources. In the book we will go over how to structure a Cordova app, re-using existing code, deploy it to an app store and consume the API that you already have. The slight overhead of writing an API Driven Application will make complete sense as we dive into how to re-use code securely and efficiently.

Electron

Similar to Cordova, the code can be re-used in Electron. This is the icing on the cake. Need a desktop app? Want to re-use a lot of existing code and access the same API? We will go through all of this.

Public Facing APIs

Now that you have your API, might as well take it public! We will go through how to open up parts of your API to third party applications so other programmers can work with your beautiful system! We will go through scopes, security, proper token structure, even logging in with your app's account!

Testing

Testing an API can be a little bit different than testing a standard request application. We will work through how to test not only the Laravel API, but also the VueJS frontend. The book will go through how to set up your testing environment along with tools such as configuring Postman to work with your API itself.

MUCH, MUCH, MORE

The application that we are building in the course will be much more in depth and will provide way more tutorials than what we already have with Roast. We will touch on all different types of Eloquent relationships, database speed enhancements, API and application hosting, etc. We are really excited to be working on this course and can't wait to share it with the world! To sign up for updates and be the first to know when the course is available sign up here: Server Side Up Mailing List.