I'm learning to use Livewire, and I see that I can use Components like Controllers, so far I have been able to manage views, data, and make some CRUD operations with Route Model Binding inside components.
Should I use components instead of controllers? Or should I keep using controllers and use the components just for frontend stuff?
Which is the best practice?
It totally depends on how you feel comfortable when structuring your application. Neither way is a best practice as such, but you may appreciate the consistency of using components everywhere.
I've seen some Livewire apps that take a minimal approach and just nest Livewire components within their standard controller-driven app. If you're easing an existing app into Livewire, this is perfect as it allows you to transition parts of it at a time. However, it's not the approach I would take if I were building an app from scratch.
I prefer to ditch controllers altogether. I enjoy having a complete Livewire component hierarchy that represents my app, with my page components at primary level, and then any nested components in a directory of the same name. Let's take this example -
app/Http/Livewire
- Account.php < Account page component
- Account < Account page nested components directory
- UpdateNameForm.php < Nested update name component
- UpdatePasswordForm.php < Nested update password component
- DeleteForm.php < Nested account deletion component
- Dashboard.php < Dashboard page component
To me, it really doesn't matter if some of my page components are static. There's not really any significant performance overhead of using Livewire to render a view as opposed to a controller. You know exactly where to look for lots of your application logic, without digging to see if a page is dynamic or not. You're also able to benefit from some sweet features that Livewire provides, such as route model binding using a typed component property. You can even remove your component's render() method if you are following the default file naming conventions.