It's been three weeks since my first New in Vue article, about time to start composing another. Did you know it is actually pretty hard to force yourself into writing articles on regular basis? But Vue.js world keeps evolving and new inspiring topics emerge almost every day. Let's have a look.
Vite 7.0 and the big plans ahead
New major version of this de-facto standard build tool for (not only) Vue was released on June 24. The changes are not meant to be revolutionary this time, but as you can see from the linked changelog, it is a very vivid project and a bunch of fixes and new features were already delivered in subsequent minor/patch versions.
Vite is a thing in modern JavaScript world, slowly making its way into more and more projects and frameworks. It has recently surpassed Webpack in popularity (measured by weekly NPM downloads):
But this is still just a beginning. I've watched Evan You's recent talk from recent JSNation conference about all the new stuff being on the way:
Meanwhile, some of those things are already happening in the "ViteLand". If you're interested, you can read through this useful overview. And rest assured more news will hit us soon.
Visual testing is heading into Vitest v4
Vitest is a test framework which is already worth of your attention. But it will be even better soon! As it was announced just recently, the upcoming new version 4 will include built-in visual regression tests via toMatchScreenshot function. Currently it is still in beta, but I believe we are just days from the GA release.
Visual regression testing is pretty useful technique to find unexpected bugs being introduced with changes in frontend apps. I managed to setup it for one of my side projects - it is rendering stuff on HTML canvas and I need to be sure that if I change something in the rendering engine, all cases (currently 220+) still give the expected output.
It really saved me a lot of embarrassing errors, because naturally you hardly foresee all the consequences of your changes. My solution has two problems though - it became quite slow (more than 5 minutes) and it is built upon a library called BackstopJS which is not really being much maintained anymore.
I was thinking about finding some alternative and I noticed there are efforts to do it with Vitest. But now it sounds it will be included directly in the framework, no custom workarounds! I am super excited and looking forward to giving it a try. I will let you know how it went.
Nuxt - steady backward-compatible evolution
Since Nuxt 4 was released last month, we already got three patch versions that seems to be occurring in quite steady weekly pace. Each one fixes some new issues and makes the framework better and better.
Meanwhile, the backward compatibility channel was also opened. With Nuxt 3.18, new features and things that are being fixed in v4 and can be backported into v3 started flowing. This support will be maintained for at least half a year. This should give everyone using Nuxt v3 enough time to plan and execute migration, which btw. should really be quite easy unless you have some very special setup.
And in case you do, don't hesitate to seek help from the Nuxt team. They are all friendly and the most helpful people.
That's it for now. Thank you for your attention, enjoy the rest of the summer and see you again in a month or so 👋
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Top comments (3)
haha I believe you that it is pretty hard to write an article on a regular basis. I am learning from your articles, and enjoying them. There seems to be a lot going on in the JavaScript-world and Vue-world. I wish I was more functional with these these technologies to really appreciate/use these changes. This article got me excited to continue learning. Nice work Alois! I hope the visual testing experience, and results are good for you.
Thank you for uplifting comment!
Visual tests turned out not so straightforward as I hoped. It seems it requires Vitest browser mode, which opens a bit confusing UI window. I would need more time (and also more patience to understand the workflow).
Ah man. Such is the way of software. It'll get better, but til then, good luck!