Blog Post: Our Tech Journey with BeaverHealth-Vulnerable-Web-App
For our capstone project, we’re building BeaverHealth-Vulnerable-Web-App—a purposely vulnerable web app to learn about security issues. Out of all the tools we’ve used, our favorite is Laravel. Its extra features, clean syntax, and built-in tools make developing web applications a breeze. We even love how it handles routing and templating so elegantly, it really feels like a real asset.
On the flip side, Docker has been our least favorite. Although it creates a stable, reproducible environment, setting up containers and managing volumes was a steep learning curve. Over time, we’ve grown to appreciate Docker for its consistency in development and deployment, even if it was a bit of a headache at first.
If I could change anything, I’d streamline our Docker setup, maybe use Docker Compose more effectively or try a different container management system.
Laravel works like this: when a user makes a request, Laravel’s routing directs it to a controller. The controller talks to models (which handle our database) and then passes the data to Blade templates to build the page. Meanwhile, middleware takes care of tasks like authentication and logging, keeping everything neat and organized.
Overall, while Docker was challenging at first, it’s taught us a lot about modern development practices. Laravel’s ease of use and powerful features make it hard to beat—and if we started over, we’d definitely stick with it.