Laravel 8: Second Look at Inertia

In an earlier post, I shared a post about Laravel 8 + Laravel Jetstream, and what is included out of the box with Laravel's new UI scaffolding packages. I have to say, I am pretty impressed.

That being said, recently, I built a Task Management app for a job interview with Laravel 8, and I decided to use Inertia + Jetstream. After building the application, I was a little disappointed, to be honest.

In my opinion, the modern way to build applications is API-centric. A website backend should be returning JSON from API requests, and the frontend should be interacting with that API.

The way that Inertia is built is that way in the inner workings. They use Axios in the backside, but this is nicely packaged into Inertia methods that make the API somewhat invisible to the developer.

My question is this.

Why are we making it easy for developers to not learn API development?

In my opinion, a modern web application should be a central place where API requests can be made from a variety of front ends. Think mobile apps, web apps, and desktop apps.

The Inertia route makes it super easy to build a backend for the web app front end, but at the end of the day, if you want to serve content to a mobile app, you will need to build a separate API for those requests.

I'm just not sure why I would want to do this?

Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments on youtube: