JSDoc VS vite

You may like JSDoc[1] if you just want some type-safety from the IDE without the compilation overhead.

It’s done wonders when I’ve had to wrangle poorly commented legacy JavaScript codebases where most of the overhead is tracing what type the input parameters are.

Personally, I’m impartial to TypeScript or JSDoc at this point. But I’d rather have either over plain JavaScript.

[1] https://jsdoc.app/

I wholeheartedly agree. At most, I introduce JSDoc[1] to newer developers as standardising how parameters and whatnot are commented at least gets you better documentation and _some_ safety without adding any TS knowledge overhead.

[1] https://jsdoc.app/

This is where JSDoc comes to save the day.

The best way to do this, of course, is with JSDoc. But something I always found awkward about jsdoc is defining the object types in the same file. So, after a lot of reading, I found a way to combine JSDoc with declaration type files from Typescript. Let me give you an example:

There is a lot of specific symbols presented on the JSDOC specification that can be found here: https://jsdoc.app

JSDoc is a specification for the comment format in JavaScript. This specification allows developers to describe the structure of their code, data types, function parameters, and much more using special comments. These comments can then be transformed into documentation using appropriate tools.

Working with new features, frameworks, and tools, the experience of reading documentation is a critical part of it. I have been lucky to work with projects that feature really easy to read documentation such as USWDS and Bun, but I've also had the misfortune to work with pretty terrible documentation like JSDoc. The JSDoc documentation lacks a search field which makes searching for specific items an ordeal and also does not cover many hidden use cases. It provides less than the bare minimum for what it needs to do - a lot of the time I am forced to rely on external user documentation elsewhere to use JSDoc effectively. That was why I was drawn to the search field in particular in Docusaurus.

The Svelte team followed suit but motivated by the maintainer's developer experience as they migrated the project away from TypeScript in favor of plain JSDoc comments for type annotations instead.

Even more relevant, tools like Javadoc, JSDoc, Doxygen, etc. read comments in a specific format to generate documentation. These comments do not affect readability. On the contrary, Javadocs are great for explaining how to use these entities. Combined with tools like my dear Doctest, we even get guarantees of accuracy and correctness!

Document types with JSDoc annotations

As of this writing, initializing a Hattip project requires some manual commands. However, keep in mind that a zero-config development environment based on Vite is in the works.

import { defineConfig } from 'vite' import react from '@vitejs/plugin-react' // https://vitejs.dev/config/ export default defineConfig({ plugins: [react()], server: { port: 4200, } })

For the frontend of "I Disappear," I leverage the automated build & deploy system provided by Netlify, which seamlessly integrates with Vite. This setup ensures that every deployment is optimized for performance, utilizing Vite’s modern build tools to enhance speed and efficiency.

Given our team's collective proficiency within the React ecosystem, we decided to leverage this expertise for our project. Initially, we contemplated utilizing Next.js; however, due to the limited practical experience with this technology among key engineers and the pressing timeline to develop the first prototype, we opted for a Single Page Application(SPA) approach. For bundling, we selected Vite, primarily due to its super fast build times, simplicity of configuration, and potential for a nearly seamless transition to server-side rendering.

We are continuing to add new project templates for various types of projects, and we've recently created one for the infamous combination of React with Vite tooling.

Vite focuses on providing an extremely fast development server and workflow speed in web development. It uses its own ES module imports during development, speeding up the startup time.

Vite and Next.js are both top 5 modern development framework right now. They are both great depending on your use case so we’ll discuss 4 areas: Architecture, main features, developer experience and production readiness. After learning about these we’ll have a better idea of which one is best for your project.

import { defineConfig } from 'vite' import react from '@vitejs/plugin-react-swc' import path from 'path' // https://vitejs.dev/config/ export default defineConfig({ plugins: [react()], server: { port: 3000 }, css: { devSourcemap: true }, resolve: { alias: { '~': path.resolve(__dirname, './src') } } })

I am currently utilizing Vite:

Homepage: https://vitejs.dev/