I tried to pick up where I left off with my Laravel skills. I began with some vuejs pages and wrote the api to feed the data to them using axios. It took me a while to get an authenticated version of the api’s working. I added in bearer authentication using tokens, as I used to - then realised my single page experience wasn’t so great.
I was clearly doing something wrong, as my navigation was loading pages when navigating. It worked, but didn’t flow like I imagined it should when I developed an SPA previously.
At this point, I went back and started to look at the documentation properly. I learned that there’s no need for axios (generally) as the proper way to do things is by using Inertia
Inertia isn’t a framework, nor is it a replacement to your existing server-side or client-side frameworks. Rather, it’s designed to work with them. Think of Inertia as glue that connects the two.
Things certainly have changed a lot.
I took out all of my axios code from my vues and added props to them instead. Then in my controllers I passed data as if I were sending it to a blade template. The data arrived in the props and I can then access it in my vues in the same way as I did before. What I found strange was you even take this same approach for what would previously be XHR requests - Inertia will make your regular non-API calls into XHR requests and update the props for you, effectively doing the API work for you.
This means inertia deals with all the security in the same was as it does for normal web controller functions. I get dynamically updated data, without the need to roll my own API’s. The code in my vues almost disappeared as I don’t need to do much in terms of API calls to update data for pagination etc.
The key changes for me were to return Inertia:render() rather than return view(). Then in any call I make to POST data do the same thing - return an Inertia response, or use redirect)->back().
The key really is READ THE DOCUMENTATION!