SvelteKit + Laravel API vs Svelte + Inertia + Laravel

[romek-codes]

Hi guys, i wanted to get your opinion, i want to use a Laravel backend with svelte as my Frontend, but can't decide between these two approaches.

Would there be any drawbacks if i decided on using Svelte with Inertia instead of SvelteKit with an API? Because i can't seem to come up with any.

The biggest Inertia advantage for me, which is kind of subjective is that it would all be in one repository, as opposed to having two separate ones. But that is my preference.

Help would be greatly appreciated.

[ramonmalcolm10]

Personally for me I would build the full application in Sveltekit if there is no need to have any API which will be reuse by other clients. This approach would reduce the amount of work needed.

There a few draw backs with using Svelte with inertia:

• Svelte don’t get as much attention from the team building out Inertia. Primary focus is for Vue and then React.
• Not much community support since most person use Vue with Inertia
• You don’t get any typescript support with the Inertia svelte package.
• Saw a few svelte bugs and MR which were raised that don’t get any attention.
• Not sure if it support Svelte 4
• Not sure if they will be able to keep up with pace of Svelte changes that will come in the future.
• There is no new exciting features in the pipeline for Inertia.
• Inertia library support and maintenance is not as dedicated as the support received by Svelte.
• Inertia don’t offer streaming or prefetching.
• Also when deploying you will need to have a node server running if you need SSR

I know laravel is really powerful, if you really want to use Laravel then I would recommend using Vue with Inertia.

[aloker]

We've done several combinations of Svelte+backend in the past, and the two approaches that worked best for us were a) full stack SvekteKit for everything and b) SvelteKit with external GraphQL APIs. Type safety is important for us and with SK only or SK + GraphQL that was well possible.

I have no experience with Inertia nor Laravel (we're using ASP.NET Core), but personally I'd cut out as many middle men as possible. SvelteKit is good at building frontends, Laravel is probably good at building APIs. From what I read, I don't see to much benefit from using Inertia.

Personally, for simpler apps (I'm not saying "small", more in the sense classic "request > DB stuff > response" style apps"), I'd go for SvelteKit only if possible For apps that may grow into something more complex (say using a stateful multi node actor system cluster), I'd use SvelteKit + a (ideally single typed) API.

In the end, it depends mainly on the requirements, team structure and maybe what's already there.

Bonus exercise: add streaming promises for secondary data plus trpc or GraphQL subscriptions for super snappy user experience.

[KoljaL]

Another advantage for using SvelteKit as a SPA with a PHP API, is that you don't need a NodeJS server. Instead almost every webspace is good enough to running your app.

Btw, maybe that channel is interesting for this topic:
https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC-G0pXZBOqqIFMI-Ky1EBeA/videos