Syntax - Tasty Web Development Treats

From React To SvelteKit

Sep 22 '21

In this episode of Syntax, Scott talks with Wes about moving Level Up Tutorials from React to SvelteKit — why he did it, how, benefits, things to watch out for, and more!

Prismic - Sponsor

Prismic is a Headless CMS that makes it easy to build website pages as a set of components. Break pages into sections of components using React, Vue, or whatever you like. Make corresponding Slices in Prismic. Start building pages dynamically in minutes. Get started at prismic.io/syntax.

Sentry - Sponsor

If you want to know what’s happening with your code, track errors and monitor performance with Sentry. Sentry’s Application Monitoring platform helps developers see performance issues, fix errors faster, and optimize their code health. Cut your time on error resolution from hours to minutes. It works with any language and integrates with dozens of other services. Syntax listeners new to Sentry can get two months for free by visiting Sentry.io and using the coupon code TASTYTREAT during sign up.

Cloudinary - Sponsor

Cloudinary is the best way to manage images and videos in the cloud. Edit and transform for any use case, from performance to personalization, using Cloudinary’s APIs, SDKs, widgets, and integrations.

Show Notes

07:28 - Thoughts

Apples to oranges, so unfortunately, no super legit ability to compare.
- SvelteKit isn’t analogous with a custom React setup that uses CSR
  - SSR is usually going to be faster - we can ship less JS
  - Some big things changed beyond React → SvelteKit
    - Apollo → GFetch
    - Plyr → Vime
  - HLS starts grabbing chunks immediately, so it’s hard to get accurate load time and transfer.
Whole conversion took a couple of months.
Hardest part was making UI choices and changes, straight up converting components one by one wasn’t actually that tough

16:14 - Converting React components to Svelte

useState becomes just a straight-up variable
Graphql calls were hooks now just imported generated functions
Remove extranous fragments
Convert {things && } to {#if thing}{/if}
becomes

24:06 - Spark joys

State
- Our checkout flow became way more transparent, way easier with Svelte stores
Render flow
- Was never something we needed to really think about. Didn’t think about memoizing, or worrying about too many renders down the line, just never needed to
Overall developer experience
- It’s honestly a joy to work in and I don’t want to go back
Making a library
- Package dir, new SvelteKit project, svelte-kit package
- I made svelte-toy - https://github.com/leveluptuts/svelte-toy
- svelte-element-query - https://github.com/leveluptuts/Svelte-Element-Query
- svelte-simple-datatable fork
Creating a sitemap was extremely easy, because of server-side routes. file.returnformat.ts ie sitemap.xml.ts
CSS without a css-in-js library for scoping is a dream. CSS props are now 100% via CSS variables using the https://svelte.dev/docs#style_props
Animations are all done with Svelte’s internal animations lib

32:45 - Hosting

adapter-node
Hosted on render.com as a straight-up node process $7/m for more than enough RAM and CPU,
Lots of other options for static, Vercel, workers whatever, I like having just a straight-up node app you can host anywhere

35:50 - Things to do

Admin tools
- Pancake lib for charts

37:00 - Challenges

ESM is not always smooth sailin
- Import has from ‘lodash/has’ didn’t working in dev, but import has from ‘lodash/has.js’ didn’t work in prod.
  - Solution was to use lodash.has as the dependency
  - Apollo included all React as a dep unless you import from @core
TS is great, but there was once where I wanted to define the entire props ts object for a spread prop, but was not possible
Drag animations

Cloudinary

42:46 - Wes’ questions