Javascript

Announcing Qwik for starter.dev

Published Feb 15, 2023

Updated Feb 15, 2023

3 min read

This article was written over 18 months ago and may contain information that is out of date. Some content may be relevant but please refer to the relevant official documentation or available resources for the latest information.

Hello there! Today, I'm so excited to introduce our new Qwik starter kit, which comes with 4 different technologies configured, and is ready for use. These technologies are: Qwik City, Storybook, Tailwind CSS, and GraphQL.

In this short article, we will talk about the core framework, the routing, example apps to get you started, the tools and technologies used in this kit, and how it is a great out-of-the-box starter for your next Qwik project.

Qwik

Qwik is a new JavaScript framework by Misko Hevery, creator of Angular, for building frontend browser applications. The major benefit of Qwik is its performance optimization, which features resumability and lazy loading. Today we will be focusing on the Qwik framework starter kit.

Technologies Used in the Starter Kit

Qwik City The kit is configured to make use of Qwik City, which offers directory-based routing (you don’t have to worry about colocation) and much more. Qwik City is a meta-framework of Qwik. It brings an opinionated and performant way to build sites at scale.
Storybook Storybook is a frontend workshop for building UI components and pages in isolation, testing, and documentation. It is open source and free. It is a great tool for testing and visualizing your components in different states. Qwik currently doesn’t have out-of-the-box support for Storybook, but we have figured out a way to configure it for Qwik. For more information on how we set up Storybook in Qwik, visit here.
Tailwind CSS Because Tailwind CSS is one of the most loved CSS libraries, we also included in this kit. Tailwind CSS is an open-source CSS framework. There is no special configuration to use Tailwind CSS in your Qwik app. You can use module CSS, or follow along with the kit (i.e we export the CSS classes as a variable). We will still achieve the same result, and make our code a bit cleaner, unlike when we write the CSS classes in the JSX directly.
GraphQL GraphQL is another great tool that was added to the kit. This gives you an out-of-the-box configuration to start making API calls to your GraphQL backend. GraphQL is an open-source data query and manipulation language for APIs, and a runtime for fulfilling queries with existing data.

How to Get Started

To get started, visit the Qwik starter.dev page for all the steps needed to create a new application with our starter.dev CLI, and run the application on your local system.

Example Apps in the Starter Kit

In this starter kit, we have two main components;

Counter
Greeting

In the Counter component, we see how we can utilize the useStore hook provided by Qwik to store our counter state.

In the Greeting component, we made use of the GraphQL config in the starter kit. The app sends a query request with the value entered in the input field, which is then returned back as a response from the API.

With all of these configurations and code samples, we believe that with this Qwik starter kit, you can start building your production-scale application.

Conclusion

Qwik is still in its early days, and we will continue to update as we learn more. We welcome everyone to take a look, and if you have any questions or run into any trouble feel free to join the discussions going on at starter.dev or on our Discord.

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About the author(s)

Chinedu Okpala
@allstackDev @allStackDev1

Using React In Your Qwik Application

Introduction React, developed by Meta, is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces, and it is one of the most used UI JavaScript libraries in the world. React will be turning a decade old by May 2023. It has gained a lot of popularity over the years, and its latest version, React 18, was released in March 2022. Qwik is a new JavaScript framework by Misko Hevery, creator of Angular, for building frontend browser applications. The major benefit of Qwik is its performance optimization, which features resumability and lazy loading. As it stands now, there are virtually no Qwik third-party packages or libraries that currently exist, but luckily the Qwik team factored this in, making it easy for developers to easily integrate React libraries or your old React components into your Qwik project without too much difficulty. In this article, I will show you how to easily integrate React libraries or components into your Qwik project. Project Set Up To get started, we need to create a new Qwik app. We can do this by running the following command in our terminal: ` You can also get additional tools and configurations using our starter.dev kit by running the command in your terminal: ` You will be prompted to enter the name of your project (let’s call it qwik-react), choose the default option when asked to select a starter, and then install npm dependencies. Now we have our Qwik application ready to go. Let’s start the development server and see what it looks like; ` Now that our app is up and running we will see how we can integrate a React package and component into our Qwik project. Integrating React in Qwik Like most JavaScript frontend libraries or frameworks, React makes use of hydration, which has its drawbacks and might be more expensive than you think. Qwik needs no hydration on load. It’s just pure HTML. This makes Qwik qwiker to load UIs, with which users can start interacting. You should keep this in mind when considering to include React components in your Qwik applications. QwikReact is a tool that allows you to use React components in Qwik, including the whole ecosystem of component libraries such as Material UI, Threejs and React Spring. To get started, we need to run this command inside our Qwik app: ` This will install needed dependencies such as qwik-react, react, and react-dom. It will also add emotion and mui, which you can uninstall if you don’t intend to use them. If we check our project, we should now have some new folders generated. The most important is the src/integrations/react. This is where all our React components will be implemented or React packages will be used. Qwikify$ The qwikify$ function is exported from @builder.io/qwik-react, which converts React components into Qwik components that you can use across your application, and allows Qwik to implement partial hydration of React components. You cannot use React components in Qwik without converting them first to remove React’s hydration pattern, which is not supported in Qwik, using qwikify$(). Another important thing to remember is to make sure the file containing your React component has this; ` This needs to be imported at the top of the file as this serves as instructions to the compiler to use React as the JSX factory. This means you cannot mix your React components with a Qwik component. The code above is from the Qwik demo. You can see how the React components are wrapped with the qwikify$() function. If your React package requires some configuration, don’t try to pass it as a props. Instead, do every configuration right inside the file, ensuring only the dynamic data is passed through. The code above is from our Qwik GitHub showcase. Check out the full source code here. So once you are done with Qwikifying your React component, you can now import and use it just as you would normally do a Qwik component. Let’s run our application, and navigate to the React page at ` to view the default Qwik demo; ` Interactivity Qwik tries to reduce or completely remove hydrations, but React heavily depends on it. This means we have to find a way to hydrate our React Component without affecting the concept of Qwik. Qwik allows you to decide when to hydrate your components by using the client: JSX properties. This technique is commonly referred to as “partial hydration”. For more information on this checkout Adding Interactivity on Qwik Docs. Conclusion In this article, we saw how to convert React to a Qwik component. We also learned about the dos and don’ts of using React in Qwik, as well as how to handle hydration. I hope you enjoyed this article. Thank you for reading! If you have any questions or run into any trouble, feel free to join the discussions going on at starter.dev or on our Discord....

Nov 25, 2022

5 mins

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How to Setup Storybook in a Qwik Project

Introduction Storybook is a great tool for testing and visualizing your components in different states. In this article, we will see how to setup Storybook in a Qwik project. Qwik Qwik is a new JavaScript framework by Misko Hevery, creator of Angular, for building frontend browser applications. The major benefit of Qwik is its performance optimization, and this is achieved through zero loading, resumability, lazy loading, reduced rendering, scalability, and code once. For more information on Qwik, you can check out the docs, github repo, and discord. Project Set Up To get started, we need to create a new Qwik app. We can do this by running the following command in our terminal: ` Initialize Storybook Storybook, unfortunately, doesn’t have a Qwik template yet because it is a new Framework. So the work around is to use the html template . Using the command below, we can initialize Storybook: ` During the initialization, Storybook would ask to automatically install some optional dependencies such as; EslintPlugin and npm7, you can accept or reject it. To accept, type y and hit Enter to progress. Storybook would try to setup a default stories folder, which is based on the ` template we choose, which is `. It is not compatible with the Qwik compiler and will result in compilation errors, so we will have to delete it to avoid running into such errors. Project Structure Our project structure is already setup by Qwik, and Storybook initialization has created a .storybook folder. But we need to make some changes to the Storybook file extension since our project is in TypeScript. This is a snippet of the folders in our project: ` Configuring Storybook Since Qwik runs on Vite, we need to set up the viteFinal function in our main.ts file, which will give us the config that we will use to register our Qwik Vite plugin. Add this line of code in the configuration object: ` In the preview.ts file, this is where we configure how Storybook renders our stories. We need to execute Qwikloader. This will help in registering global browser events, and much more Qwik related benefits. We will replace the content in the file with the code below: ` This solution was found in this discussion: How to do component testing with Qwik?. I believe when the Qwik Storybook type template becomes available these configurations will be there by default. Now we are done with the configuration, let's run storybook and see what we have: ` Creating Stories We can create our first story, we will create a story for our Qwik app component. We will create this story for our default Qwik Header component. I modified the Header component to accept a menus props: ` Conclusion In this article, we saw how to setup Storybook in a Qwik project. We also saw how to create our first story. I hope you enjoyed this article. Thanks for reading. If you don't want to do these steps yourself, check out our starter.dev Qwik kit that already has Storybook enabled for your use here. A link to the project repo can be found here. If you have any questions or run into any trouble, feel free to reach out on Twitter....

Dec 12, 2022

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Qwik

Using Zustand in Your Next React Project

Introduction This article, we will focus more on the practical use of Zustand in a real world project. You can check this article Zustand for State Management if you need an introductory read on the topic. We will be focusing on making API calls right from our Zustand store, and also persisting state to either session or local storage. The project we are going to build is a GitHub user search page where we can experiment with GitHub API. We will be able to search for users, and get more information about a user. We will also see how we can persist the store state. Project Set Up To get started, we need to create a new React app. We can do this by running the following command in our terminal: npx create-react-app zustand-demo --template typescript Project Dependencies After the project is created, we need to install our project dependencies. We can do this by running the following command in our terminal: yarn add zustand @chakra-ui/react @emotion/react @emotion/styled react-icons react-router-dom axios framer-motion pluralize query-string react-helmet-async react-hook-form react-paginate Project Structure After installing our project dependencies, we need to create our project structure. We can do this by creating the following folders in our project: src ├── index.tsx ├── assets ├── container ├── components ├── pages ├── routes ├── services ├── store └── theme ENV Variables After creating our project structure, we need to create our env variables. We can do this by creating a .env file in our project root, and adding the following variables: REACT_APP_GITHUB_API_URL=https://api.github.com Services After creating our env variables, we need to create our services. We can do this by creating a githubService.ts file in our services folder, and adding the following code: ` Store Setup Next, we will set up our Github store. We will be implementing the Zustand persist method to persist our state to either session or local storage. ` We were able to make an asynchronous call to the GitHub api, and set the response to our store right from our store nicely without having to use extra middleware. We also cached our users details so that we don't have to make another API call to get the same user details again. We also persisted our state to session storage. We can also persist our state to local storage by changing the getStorage method to localStorage. Clear/Reset Store Right now, there is no out of the box method from Zustand. But we can do that by adding a clear/reset method to our store, resetting our state back to the initial state and calling the sessionStorage or localStorage clear() method. ` A link to the project repo can be found here, and a link to the live demo can be found here. If you have any questions or run into any trouble, feel free to reach out on Twitter or Github....

Sep 30, 2022

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Understanding the Difference Between `:focus` and `:focus-visible` in CSS

Understanding the Difference Between :focus and :focus-visible in CSS I have learned my fair share about the importance of keyboard accessibility, so I know that visual indication of the focused element is very important. But the well-known :focus pseudo-class is not always the best fit for this job. That's where :focus-visible comes in. Let's look at the differences between these two pseudo-classes and explore the best practices for using them effectively. What is the :focus Pseudo-Class? The :focus pseudo-class is a CSS selector that applies styles to any element that receives focus, regardless of how that focus was triggered. This includes focus events from keyboard navigation, mouse clicks, and touch interactions. Example Usage of :focus ` In this example, the button will display a blue outline whenever it is focused, whether the user clicks on it with a mouse, taps it on a touchscreen, or navigates to it using the keyboard. What is the :focus-visible Pseudo-Class? The :focus-visible pseudo-class is more specialized. It only applies styles to an element when the browser determines that the focus should be visible. This typically occurs when the user navigates via the keyboard or assistive technologies rather than through mouse or touch input. Example Usage of :focus-visible ` Here, the button will only show a blue outline when focused through keyboard navigation or another input method that usually requires visible focus indicators. Key Differences Between :focus and :focus-visible :focus - Behavior: Applies to any element that receives focus, regardless of the input method. - Use Cases: Ensures that all interactions with the element are visually indicated, whether by mouse, keyboard, or touch. :focus-visible - Behavior: Applies styles only when the focus should be visible, such as using a keyboard or assistive technology. - Use Cases: Ideal for scenarios where you want to provide focus indicators only to keyboard and assistive technology users while avoiding unnecessary outlines for mouse and touch users, typically required by design. Accessibility Implications :focus - Pros: - Guarantees that all users can see when an element is focused, which is critical for accessibility. - Cons: - Can lead to a suboptimal experience for mouse users, as focus styles may appear unnecessarily during mouse interactions. :focus-visible - Pros: - Enhances user experience by showing focus indicators only when necessary, thus keeping the interface clean for mouse and touch users. - Tailors the experience for keyboard and assistive technology users, providing them with clear visual cues. - Cons: - Additional considerations may be required to ensure that focus indicators are not accidentally omitted, especially in older browsers that do not support :focus-visible. - There may be cases where you want to show focus indicators for all users, regardless of input method. Best Practices for Using :focus and :focus-visible To achieve the best accessibility and user experience, combining both :focus and :focus-visible in your CSS is often a good idea. Combining :focus and :focus-visible ` Here is a Stackblitz example of what such styling could look like for you to try out and play with. Additional Tips - Test with Keyboard and Assistive Technology: Ensure that your web application is navigable using a keyboard (Tab, Shift + Tab, etc.) and that focus indicators are visible for those who rely on them. It's never a bad idea to include accessibility testing in your e2e testing suite. - Provide Clear Focus Indicators: Make sure that focus indicators are prominent and easy to see. A subtle or hard-to-spot focus indicator can severely impact accessibility for users who rely on keyboard navigation. Conclusion The :focus-visible pseudo-class offers a more refined way to manage focus indicators, improving accessibility and user experience, particularly for keyboard and assistive technology users. By understanding the differences between :focus and :focus-visible, and applying best practices in your CSS, you can create more accessible and user-friendly web applications. Remember, accessibility should never be an afterthought. By thoughtfully applying focus styles, you ensure that all users, regardless of how they interact with your site, can easily navigate and interact....

Nov 8, 2024

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Announcing Qwik for starter.dev

Qwik

Technologies Used in the Starter Kit

How to Get Started

Example Apps in the Starter Kit

Conclusion

Chinedu Okpala

You might also like

Using React In Your Qwik Application

How to Setup Storybook in a Qwik Project

Using Zustand in Your Next React Project

Understanding the Difference Between `:focus` and `:focus-visible` in CSS

Let's innovate together!

You might also like

Using React In Your Qwik Application

How to Setup Storybook in a Qwik Project

Using Zustand in Your Next React Project

Understanding the Difference Between `:focus` and `:focus-visible` in CSS