php - What application structure to use with AngularJS and Laravel?

Question

I recently started to build a large social network, and and I thought my structure was good but it turned out I built this logic up badly.

I mixed my views with AngularJS (bad idea), skipped blade extension, but since I'm using a lot of block and sidebar includes it became a pain in the butt.

Currently I am just handling form validations with angular, but actually all of my site pages will require ajax, data pulling, etc.

I was searching around the net and I saw that angular views are stored in the public folder, but since all my pages will use angular is it a good idea to store all my views in the public, and just use Laravel as a back end?

I know this is a silly question but I'm confused a bit.

Any help hint appreciated.

Answer 1

There are two ways to combine these frameworks:

1. Only client-side rendering

   This is the easier way and used by most web applications. In this case you would use Laravel as an API endpoint which will return JSON. Angular can query this data through its $http or $resource service and compile the templates, which you store in the public folder. Angular templates are just HTML with directives and some {{var}} statements. This way Angular does all the routing too.

2. Server-side and client-side rendering

   This is the harder way where Laravel would do the routing and compile some templates on the server-side. You would use Angular only for some interactions on the site in a way you would use jQuery for example. The benefit of this approach is performance as users will get the full HTML the first time they visit your site. The disadvantage is that you may have to write some logic twice and can’t use some of Angular’s features.