Why Laravel GIS?
Laravel GIS is an ongoing project with all explanations available at LaravelGIS
In this learning/educational project I will try to cover and implement most of the common Geographical Information Systems feature needs using postgis, geoserver, openlayers and Laravel through the design and development of a single Laravel project.
I'm building this project as if it was a full course aimed at Laravel developers who want to get into the GIS world and I might add screencasts to some/all of the posts in the future.
I will try to make one commit per post and reference it at the end of each post, the post itself will explains the details.
You should be able to follow along on a Ubuntu development machine, but also on any platform running docker.
If you have any question and/or comment, please create an account on LaravelGIS and post a comment on a post.
I've been working as a developer with commercial and opensource GIS software for more than 20 years. I kind of let the commercial ESRI/Microsoft a few years ago to concentrate on opensource. In my opinion, the Laravel framework is a piece of beauty for backend development, the developer experience is simply amazing. So my goto Web/GIS backend stack is now:
I'm really more on the backend/devops than on the frontend when it comes to web development so the frontend stack I use is a minimal one: Alpine.js. As stated by Caleb Porzio, it's creator, "Alpine is a rugged, minimal tool for composing behavior directly in your markup". It's syntax is very similar to Vuejs so, if you are familiar with Vue, learning Alpine is a piece of cake.
Along with Alpine.js, I also heavily use Laravel Livewire, a Laravel package also created by Caleb Porzio. Livewire is like magic as is allows the creation of frontend reactive backend components in Laravel using it's blade templating engine. Finally, the last piece of the frontend puzzle is OpenLayers, which is, in my opinion, the most complete Javascript mapping library.
As a development stack, we will use docker (it is actually the only required dependency for the project)
Laravel offer a great Docker environment with Laravel Sail but we will try to work with docker directly in order to have complete control over the docker images we use. Docker might be intimidating at first but is really powerful and will allow us to have the perfect PHP/Laravel development environment with all of our dependencies running smoothly.