Laravel for Flutter

Laravel decided that a web framework should come with the boring parts already written: an ORM, migrations, queues, mail, scheduling, auth, policies and realtime broadcasting. Dartvel is that decision applied to Flutter. Because both ends are Dart, the client that calls your backend is generated from the backend instead of written twice.

@DVModel()
class const _Invoice({
  required final String number,
  required final double total,
  required final DateTime issuedAt,
  final DateTime? paidAt,
});

// generated: the table, the typed client, the form,
// the admin screen and the migration

Dartvel: @DVModel: table, typed client, form, admin and a public page per record from one class

Laravel: php artisan make:migration, written by hand, then migrate

Dartvel: Generated from the model. SQLite is migrated on start; PostgreSQL and MySQL with dartvel db migrate

Laravel: Queues with delays, retries, backoff, unique jobs and batches; Horizon

Dartvel: DV.Jobs, DV.Queues, @DVJob: priorities, retries and dead letters on seven adapters. No delayed jobs, growing backoff or unique jobs yet

Dartvel: @DVBackendCron on the server, @DVClientCron in the app

Laravel: Event broadcasting over Reverb, its WebSocket server

Dartvel: Model change streams inside one process. Delivery to devices is not built yet

Laravel: Starter kits, Fortify with two-factor and passkeys, Sanctum, Passport; WorkOS AuthKit for SSO

Dartvel: Sessions, passkeys, OAuth sign-in, SAML, LDAP, second factors, API keys, and an OAuth 2.1 provider for your own API

Laravel: Blade, Livewire, or Inertia with React, Vue or Svelte; forms written in the view

Dartvel: Flutter pages: the same code on the web and on a phone. Invoice.Form() creates a record and invoice.Form() edits one, generated from the model

Dartvel: One file from dartvel build web-server

A Laravel API and a Flutter app are two codebases in two languages, with an API client between them that somebody writes by hand or generates from an OpenAPI description they keep up to date. Renaming a field is a deploy, a release and a week of both being true. Here the function and the call to it are compiled together.

@DVBackendFunction()
Future<int> _priceWithVat(int cents, String country) async =>
    cents + cents * vatPercent(country) ~/ 100;

// in a page: typed, generated, no route string
final int total = await priceWithVat(cents: 1999, country: 'NG');

Pages are files: lib/pages/invoices/[id].dart is /invoices/:id, and moving the file breaks every link to it at compile time.

The same page renders on the web, Android, iOS, desktop and a TV.

A backend function cannot use the generated data models yet: they import Flutter, and the server is pure Dart. The app reads and writes them, and Studio and the data API serve them.

Data models run on SQLite, Postgres and MySQL today. A storage-neutral records layer is under way, and MongoDB is planned. Laravel reaches MongoDB today through the mongodb/laravel-mongodb package, which MongoDB maintains.

Laravel is fifteen years old, with a package for everything and a book for everything else.

Forge, Vapor and Laravel Cloud are running services you can pay for this afternoon. Dartvel Cloud is not open yet.

Laravel's queues delay jobs, grow the wait between retries and deduplicate jobs, and Reverb broadcasts events to browsers and apps today. Dartvel's queues do none of those three yet, and its model changes do not leave the process they happen in.

Forms are not the difference: every data model here has one, with a typed builder when you want your own layout. What the browser downloads is. A Blade page is HTML from the server. A Dartvel page is its text in HTML, then a Flutter app that has to arrive before the page is interactive: about 4 MB on this site, most of it the compiled app and the renderer. For a site that has to be light on a slow phone, Blade and Livewire send less.

Dartvel is not trying to replace Laravel on the web. It is answering the question people ask when they have a Flutter app and want the batteries Laravel gave them, without running a second stack in a second language to get them.

Laravel for Flutter, with the app in the same repository.

What you reach for in Laravel, and what it is here.

The API client is generated, and nobody maintains it.

Where Laravel is ahead today.

Dartvel next to the tools people ask about.