How can I team up two MVC frameworks without having them fight each other?

Question

I'm creating a CRUD-based web project, and am thinking about using a server side MVC framework (such as CodeIgniter or Laravel) in tandem with a client side MVC framework (such as AngularJS). Is this a fairly common approach? After all, it's clear that I need something on the server, and that doing MVC on the client as well can enhance my application. But I feel that two MVC frameworks on the same project would just get in the way of each other and lead to disproportionate complexity and repetition.What kind of approach or architecture would help me get the best out of both MVC frameworks when using one on the client, the other on the server?

Answer 1

Hi there!

What you can do is setup your back-end(server side) framework to handle incoming requests for data from your database and instead of returning html, you would return JSON. With the back end set up like this, then you can have the front-end (Angular or React) make API calls to your back-end. Once the JSON data is returned from the back-end, then the front-end can present the data in HTML which ever way you decide.

That is how they would work together without interfering with each other and without a lot of duplication. Its a good way to separate concerns of your application as well. The back-end deals with retrieving and modifying the data as a result of the API calls it receives. And the front-end presents the data it gets from the back-end. It can also send data to the back-end to be stored.

I hope this helps.

Tyler B.

ps. I would lookup Building an API with Laravel and API requests in Angular