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Sketchpad is an innovative, live-coding, development/admin environment for your existing Laravel site.
It's a place to write, test, experiment and execute code, or just a place to group useful tools and functions you want easy access to.
Sketchpad provides an alternative structure of controllers, views, assets and routing that lives alongside your main Laravel installation.
You can navigate methods, interactively modify parameters, and live-reload the code you're working on, all from a friendly UI.
Additional tooling and functionality is designed to make it quick and easy to develop or debug new tools, features and code.
A live demo can be found here:
4-minute videos to get you up and running quickly:
- Introduction: https://youtu.be/dQ-OL8d5uak
- Installation: https://youtu.be/lR5f26jhTEo
- Development: https://youtu.be/bKSAONBKuEA
- Standalone app: coming soon
Compared to other methods of running code, Sketchpad offers a more complete developer experience:
| Sketchpad | Controllers | Tinker | Commands | Jobs | Tests | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Simple | x | x | x | |||
| Interactive | x | x | x | x | ||
| Flexible | x | x | x | x | ||
| Powerful | x | x | x | x | ||
| Configurable | x | x | x | x | x | |
| Automatable | Planned | x | x | x | ||
| Deployable | x | x | x | x | x | |
| Watchable | x | x | ||||
| Visual | x | x | ||||
| Navigable | x |
Because Sketchpad offers such a unique environment in which to write and run code, its uses are myriad:
- Test out new coding ideas
- Develop tools and utilities for everyday work
- Debug applications in the same environment they're running in
- Practice with new libraries or APIs with your existing code
- Give new hires a place to get up to speed with the codebase
- Double check how that rarely-used function actually works
- Give all that "secret" or commented-out code somewhere to live
- Host an entire site (using the "Application" setup type)
- Live-document existing features and tools
- Generate and manage reports