Livewire vs Inertia: Which one Should I Choose for Laravel Development?
Laravel is one of the most widely-used PHP frameworks today. A quick Google search will surface a plethora of tools that exist within this framework’s ecosystem, and it’s easy to understand why it’s become a go-to choice for various types of projects. Whether it’s being used to create an API, a command-line tool, or a full-stack app, Laravel enables developers to reliably build robust and scalable applications.
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The framework is flexible enough to allow you to do virtually anything you want with the front-end: you can use React, Livewire, jQuery, or any other tool. But there are two tools in particular that are changing the way Laravel and PHP Developers are approaching front-end development: Laravel Livewire and Inertia.js.
In this article, we’ll dive into these tools. First, we’ll discuss the problems they were created to solve, key differences between them, and how they are helping developers navigate front-end challenges more easily.
Livewire or Inertia, Which One Should You Choose?
The question that opens this section of the text is entirely valid. However, before we discuss each option and understand which is the best choice for you, your project, and your team, it’s necessary to clarify a very important point: Inertia and Livewire are categorically different tools. While they do attempt to solve the same problem, they take essentially different approaches. Let me explain.
The Roles of Inertia and Livewire in a Web Application
Before we talk more about this topic, it’s important to understand the role that Livewire and Inertia play in a web application.
Both Inertia and Livewire make it easier to build SPAs (Single Page Applications). In case you are not so familiar or need a refresher, an SPA is a web application that dynamically rewrites the current web page with new data from the web server in response to user actions. This means that, instead of loading entire pages from the server each time the user requests a new page, an SPA only loads the necessary data and rewrites the current page the user is viewing. This results in a more fluid and faster experience.
The challenge with this approach is that it involves a significant amount of hard work, including writing a lot of boilerplate code to ensure the front-end and back-end communicate effectively with each other. That includes routes, security, and many other details.