TypeScript *

I'm Ivan Kopenkov, a senior front-end developer at Mail.ru Cloud Solutions. In this article, I will tell you about the approaches we have used for the UI library components customization. You will also learn how to significantly decrease bundle size, cutting off all the unnecessary modules Ant Design takes there.

In our case, we are making wrappers for original Ant Design components inside the project, changing their appearance, and developing their logic. At the same time, we import both customized and original components right from the ant-design module. That saves tree shaking functionality and makes complex library components use our wrappers instead of original nested elements.

If you are already or about to use Ant Design, this article will provide you with a better and more effective way to do so. Even if you have chosen another UI library, you might be able to implement these ideas.

inb4: This is not another "setting up" a new project with Vue and TypeScript tutorial. Let's do some deep dive into more complex topics!

typescript is awesome. Vue is awesome. No doubt, that a lot of people try to bundle them together. But, due to different reasons, it is hard to really type your Vue app. Let's find out what are the problems and what can be done to solve them (or at least minimize the impact).

From time to time, developers need to establish communication between several browser tabs to be able to send messages from one tab to another and receive responses. We have also faced this need at some point.

Some solutions already exist (like, for instance, BroadcastChannel API). However, its browser support leaves a lot to be desired, so we decided to use our own library. When the library was ready, that functionality was no longer required. Nevertheless, another task emerged: communication between an iframe and the main window.

On closer examination, it turned out that two-thirds of the library would not have to be changed — only some code refactoring was necessary. The library is a communication PROTOCOL that can work with text data. It can be applied in all cases in which text is transferred, such as iframes, window.open, worker, browser tabs or WebSocket.

How it works

Currently, the protocol has two functions: sending messages and subscription to events. Any message in the protocol is a data object. For us, the main field in that object is type, which tells us what kind of message it is. The type field is an enum with the following values:

If you’re unfamiliar with TypeScript, it’s a language that brings static type-checking to JavaScript so that you can catch issues before you even run your code – or before you even save your file. It also includes the latest JavaScript features from the ECMAScript standard on older browsers and runtimes by compiling those features into a form that they understand. But beyond type-checking and compiling your code, TypeScript also provides tooling in your favorite editor so that you can jump to the definition of any variable, find who’s using a given function, and automate refactorings and fixes to common problems.

(originally published on Medium)

I like writing React code. This might be an odd introduction to a story about Vue, but you need to understand my background to understand why I’m here discussing Vue.

I like writing React code and I hate reading it. JSX is a neat idea for assembling the pieces together fast, Material-UI is amazing solution for bootstrapping your next startup’s UI, computing CSS from JS constants allows you to be very flexible. Yet reading your old JSXs feels awful – even with scrupulous code review practices you might scratch your head not once as you try to figure the intricate nesting of the components.

I’ve heard many things about Vue—the not so new kid on the block—and I finally decided to get my feet wet; bringing in all my mental luggage of React and Polymer (and Angular, but let’s not talk about that).