The year is 2014 and the war of Single-Page Application (SPA) solutions is truly raging. There are many rivals: Angular, React, Ember, Knockout, and Backbone, to name but a few. However, the battle being most closely watched is between Google's Angular and Facebook's React.
Angular, the SPA king until this point, is a full-fledged framework that follows the familiar MVC paradigm. React, the unlikely challenger seems quite odd in comparison with its core library only dealing with the view layer and markup written entirely in JavaScript! While Angular holds the bigger market share, React has caused a seismic shift in how developers think about web application design and has raised the bar on framework size and performance.
Meanwhile, a developer named Evan You was experimenting with his own new framework, Vue.js. It would combine the best features of Angular and React to achieve a perfect balance between simplicity and power. Your vision would resonate so well with other developers that Vue would soon be among the most popular SPA solutions.
Despite the fierce competition, Vue gained traction quickly. This was partly thanks to Taylor Otwell, the creator of Laravel, who tweeted in early 2015 about how impressed he was with Vue. This tweet generated a lot of interest in Vue from the Laravel community.
The partnership of Vue and Laravel would become further entwined with the release of Laravel version 5.3 in September 2016, when Vue was included as a default frontend library. This was a perfectly logical alliance for two software projects with the same philosophy: simplicity and an emphasis on the developer experience.
Today, Vue and Laravel offer an immensely powerful and flexible full-stack framework for developing web applications, and as you'll find throughout this book, they're a real treat to work with.
