Best Language For Shopify App Dev?
Hi,
I understand, that it comes a bit down to your preference too but I'm really torn on this question. At one place, I'm already familiar with PHP and have a good base on Laravel (just learning a bit more frontend) but we have to use a third party open source package to get the Shopify app boilerplate on Laravel. Shopify added Laravel app on their CLI but not much info was added in that regards.
Should I go in with Laravel or should I drop it and get to Node.js? I'm just getting my hands dirty with a bit more complex JS so it'd be a bit of curve to get myself going on that.
Are you aware of any published app using Laravel as backend? Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!
I was in a similar position when I was working on a Shopify app and I decided to go with node. There were more documentation and tutorials for it and almost nothing for php. This was almost 3 years ago so I don't know if anything changed regarding that (php) but I know that it is much easier to build an app with node now as the shopify cli creates you a pretty great starting point to work with.
I didn't have much node experience when I stared and just some basic react knowledge, but still was able to create a production ready app by following their docs.
There are a lot of Shopify apps built with PHP and Laravel. Some are crazy big.
For example: https://apps.shopify.com/partners/hextom I think they build their apps with Laravel.
Just go for it, I don't think you should get into Node if you already know PHP/Laravel.
I've used Laravel to interact with Shopify on something like 3-5 projects. It worked well, no complaints. We used Laravel as most of my developers knew PHP and it was just the easiest option.
There is an official Shopify PHP SDK which works reasonable well.
I definitely agree with @feriforgacs. I would highly recommend just using node. I built a PHP Shopify app for a client. Shopify has a tendency to update requirements but provide little documentation on what the update requires. In my case, Shopify made an app requirement update that apps must support app blocks.
They wouldn't approve the app unless it supported app blocks. Unfortunately, their only documentation was in node using their node library which doesn't help at all when using PHP:
https://shopify.dev/apps/online-store/verify-support
Since almost all of their documentation uses node, it would have been a much better decision to just build directly in node (my client was familiar with PHP and already had the infrastructure to easily support a PHP app which is why it was built with PHP).
Rails