I've been following the Vue community for some time already. Reading articles, watching videos, meeting the awesome people, occasionally contributing, running the Czech translation of Vue docs and even organizing a conference in Prague.
Two interesting things happen last week that inspired me into writing this article. Hopefully, this will turn into sort of a newsletter, I will be able to publish more or less regularly. Vue is still overlooked by many, despite being mature and useful JS framework fully capable of competing with others. It deserves more attention, and I would like to help. Let's do this.
Vercel + Nuxt = ?
The first thing resonating the Vue.js ecosystem is the acquisition of NuxtLabs by the cloud platform provider Vercel. The practical outcome is that four important members of Nuxt framework team - Sebastien Chopin, Daniel Roe, Pooya Parsa, and Anthony Fu - are now being full time employees of Vercel. Their new job is said to be simple: "Keep building Nuxt!".
This information landed all of sudden (at least for me) on July 8th. A lot have been written and said since then. People are mostly happy for the guys and see it as an opportunity. Some are worried Vercel's presence may have negative impact on the future.
I believe the most important is what the direct participants think. The statement of Daniel Roe, the team lead, is available HERE. I also watched the new episode of DejaVue podcast dedicated to this move. If they are positive, we should be too. Aside from financial safety, one of big advantages mentioned was the chance to work closely with other OS teams under Vercel's hood to share experience and not to stay locked into one paradigm. Nuxt was always about giving users a choice and this aligns with such philosophy.
Also, don't forget this wasn't about "Vercel is buying Nuxt". Nuxt remain MIT-licensed open source and hardly anything would change. But the key people from the dev team are now backed by a strong player. It is a bit like a private sponsorship. And this means I can move some of my personal $12 per month bit somewhere else.
Meanwhile, Nuxt continues to improve. Patch version 3.17.7 was released just yesterday and the road to stable Nuxt v4 is open with v4.0.0-rc.0.
Quoting Daniel Roe: "The future is bright."
Vue 3.6 enters alpha
Second announcement was made in the motherly project. Vue framework is preparing to release new minor version 3.6 after almost a year of living with v3.5. During the Vue conference in China the first alpha version of v3.6 was released.
While this would be notable news itself, there is one feature included that makes it extremely interesting. It is called Vapor mode, the new compilation option for Vue components. It is an anticipated change being developed since November 2023 in a separate repository. It aims for better performance and smaller bundle sizes.
The good summary of Vapor Mode and all the other upcoming features is this article by VueSchool.
However, while things were set in motion, there is still a way to go before general availability. Last time there were 5 alphas, 3 betas and a rc.1 version and it took couple of months before v3.5 was finally released. But we are getting there. Vou can already proceed and give it a try. In fact, you are encouraged to do so and report any bugs and difficulties, you may encounter.
That's all for this first (or maybe zero) issue. Thanks for reading through it. For more news, I am maintaining a list of Nuxt News on GitHub, so far without any better UI.
Also, a great source of up-to-date information is Michael Hoffman and his Weekly Vue News, hands down the best Vue newsletter I am aware of.
Top comments (7)
Wow, that was something to here Vercel acquired Nuxt. It's great that the guys are getting fully supported financially to keep Nuxt going. I still haven't tried Nuxt, but it seems cool. Actually a good move for Vercel, since lots of Nuxt/Vue developers probably don't decide to deploy their apps there since Vercel is synonymous with Next.
I prefer Netlify for my Nuxt deployments, but I guess it is just a habit (I found it first).
Funny they just dropped a dev integration for Nuxt to keep up with Vercel developers.netlify.com/guides/run-...
haha hey that's remarkable timing by Netlify. Makes me feel good that Vue/Nuxt are being appreciated for their value. Do you ever just build Vue apps without using the Nuxt framework? I wonder how the experience of building Vue apps without Nuxt feels, after building Nuxt apps regularly.
Sadly no. I haven't tried Vue without Nuxt yet :(
Wait! You learned Nuxt without learning Vue?!? I thought knowing Vue was a pre-requisite. haha Well, awesome job to you, Alois!
Well, I was learning Vue while learning Nuxt. Since the begining, I was building things in Nuxt and digging under the hood when needed.
And actually, the most about Vue itself I learned later, when I was translating the official docs into Czech language - cs.vuejs.org/
Ah, that's very interesting! You translated the docs - wow! Congratulations on translating all of that documentation! The docs are simply wonderful.
Actually, I've tried learning Vue a few different ways: 2 video courses, and the online docs. And honestly, the docs are the absolute best for me. They are written so thoughtfully, and I feel that my understanding is much more grounded.
I intend to learn Nuxt purely because I'm interested in what Nuxt framework does for Vue developers.