vue

In the last months, I've learned a lot about Vue. From building SEO-friendly SPAs to crafting killer blogs or playing with transitions and animations, I've experimented with the framework thoroughly.

But there's been a missing piece throughout my learning: plugins.

Most folks working with Vue have either comes to rely on plugins as part of their workflow or will certainly cross paths with plugins somewhere down the road. Whatever the case, they’re a great way to leverage existing code without having to constantly write from scratch.

Many of you have likely used jQuery and are accustomed to using (or making!) plugins to create anything from carousels and modals to responsive videos and type. We’re basically talking about the same thing here with Vue plugins.

So, you want to make one? I’m going to assume you’re nodding your head so we can get our hands dirty together with a step-by-step guide for writing a custom Vue plugin.

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By default, communication between Vue components happen with the use of props. Props are properties that are passed from a parent component to a child component. For example, here’s a component where title is a prop:

<blog -post title="My journey with Vue"></blog>

Props are always passed from the parent component to the child component. As your application increases in complexity, you slowly hit what is called prop drilling here’s a relate article that is React-focused, but totally applies). Prop drilling is the idea of passing props down and down and down to child components — and, as you might imagine, it’s generally a tedious process.

So, tedious prop drilling can be one potential problem in a complex. The other has to do with the communication between unrelated components. We can tackle all of this by making use of an Event Bus.

What is an Event Bus? Well, it’s kind of summed up in the name itself. It’s a mode of transportation for one component to pass props from one component to another, no matter where those components are located in the tree.

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Let’s start with a short introduction to Vue.js slots concept. Slots are useful when you want to inject content in a specific place of a component. Those specific places that you can define are called slots.

For example, you want to create a wrapper component that is styled in a specific way but you want to be able to pass any content to be rendered inside that wrapper (it might be a string, a computed value, or even another component).

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There's this popular analogy of Vue that goes like this: Vue is what you get when React and Angular come together and make a baby. I've always shared this feeling. With Vue’s small learning curve, it's no wonder so many people love it. Since Vue tries to give the developer power over components and their implementation as much as it possibly can, this sentiment has led to today's topic.

The term renderless components refers to components that don’t render anything. In this article, we'll cover how Vue handles the rendering of a component.

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Vue is so hot right now and I’ve been thinking of doing a serious project with it since quite a while, so when the opportunity popped up, I hopped in. But there was a little problem — one of the requirements of the project was to write it in TypeScript. At first, I was super stressed about how I was going to ever get started on this combo, but vue-cli made it so easy.

I’d be lying if I said this ride was super smooth. There were frustrations, hours of staring at the screen and some fistbumps with my table but after working with Vue + TypeScript for over a month now, I can say it was worth it — and if I had to code another app with Vue, I wouldn’t do it without TypeScript.

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Welcome to Part 2 of this mini-series on building a RSS viewer with Vue. In the last post, I walked through how I built my demo using Vue.js and Vuetify on the front end and Webtask on the back end. When I built that initial version, I knew it was exactly thatmdash;an "initial" version. I took some time to work on a few updates, and while I won't dare call this a "perfect" version, I do think I've made some improvements and I'd like to share them with you.

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As I explore, learn, and most importantly, play with Vue.js, I've been building different types of apps as a way to get practice with and improve my use of it. A few weeks ago, I was reading about the shut down of Digg's RSS Reader and while great alternatives exist, I thought it would be fun to build my own with Vue. In this article, I'm going to explain how I put it together and also what's wrong with it. I knew getting into this that I was going to make some compromises, so the plan is to follow up this version with a nicer one in a follow-up post.

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If you’ve been working with Vue for a while, you may have come across this way of rendering your app — this is the default in the latest version of the CLI, in main.js:

new Vue({
 render: h => h(App)
}).$mount('#app')

Or, if you’re using a render function, possibly to take advantage of JSX:

Vue.component('jsx-example', {
  render (h) {
    return <div id="foo">bar</div>
  }
})

You may be wondering, what does that h do? What does it stand for? (more…)