Creating a link in Vue

Any HTML is legal, so you can just write a regular link, but if you want to have a fast response, it is recommended that you include Vue Router. This brings two important tags: , which this post is mainly about and.

Creating a link in Vue is as simple as:

Home

This renders a perfectly correct link, using the earlier mentioned a-tag. It even adds a nice bonus, adding an ‘active’ class when that route is active. If you prefer this class on the containing element, do this:

Home

This will render something along the lines of:

Home

Be aware: this is the only valid use-case for the tag-property in vue’s router-link component. Hence be wary if you come across any use of the tag-property, but Vue’s default is good.

You pick up on this link by defining the route ‘home’, make sure your app contains a and attach a component to this route. In the most basic form:

…

TL/DW: .css_day#ui-special

Yesterday I attended the CSS Day conference. This year only the first day, that focussed on designing user interfaces, less the building of it. Here are the key take aways for those who thought going through all slides is too long, or didn’t went.

Josh Clark - A.I. is your New Design Material

Josh urged designers to get feeling for the new design material called AI, the next big thing. We need to know what makes it different, the grain, and also know how we can use it for good. Design might have a seat at the board table, but they need to know how to align user considerations with business goals. More on AI and design by Josh Clark and more.

Steph Troeth - Behind the story

Storytelling used to be all the rage before mobile entered the scene, Steph recalls. Nevertheless, people prefer stories over plain lists of…

How do I navigate to another page in React or Vue?

Congratulations, you started working with one of the popular front-end frameworks. Both Vue and React are excellent choices to create rich and reactive applications. But sometimes, you 'just' want to show the user another page. Whether it is a simple about page, or another 'section' in the app. In this post I will cover both Vue en React and, little bonus, “React on steroids”, NextJS.

It is important to know that you need a router to make in-app pagination work. If you look up router and your favourite framework you're probably find a way to do it, accompanied with some ways to actually not do it. Hence, here I'll focus on the right way.

The basics of every link

While you can make everything clickable (or touch-able), it is important that enabling navigation between pages was already a core concept when the web was invented. Even when writing webpages using React, Vue, or most other JavaScript frameworks, it ends up as HTML to the browser (with JavaScript & CSS). HT…

Getting started with Cypress - a modern frontend testing framework

Cypress is a new, open source integration test runner for modern JS applications (its development is sponsored by their online dashboard that allows you to record test-runs). It doesn’t require setting up Selenium, or other browser plugin, manually. Add it to your package.json and everything you need will be set up:

npm install cypress --save-dev

You can open even a GUI using:

./node_modules/.bin/cypress open

Alternatively, you can run the tests headless using the run command:

./node_modules/.bin/cypress run

Running the test will leave you with video recordings of what has been happening visually on the frontend for further review.

Ok. All nice, but you're right, these are tests running against a locally run server. So let's move the examples directory out of scope of the test runner:

mv cypress/integration/examples cypress/integration-examples

*(when exploring a new framework, I typically like …

Should I use React or Angular?

To put it in some context: these days recruiters call you whether you know this or that framework. Well not really, really well. But it is just JavaScript. Or ECMAScript (or a flavour of it by Microsoft called TypeScript). But above all it is just a tool to get stuff done. Not every job needs a bulldozer. And besides the bulldozers React and Angular there is Vue.js and plenty more. Choose your tools wisely.

Learning from failures: off-line support in a rails-app

As a web-developer you typically assume that your users are always using your app on-line. When asked a year ago to start developing an app for the art-consulting firm QKunst I was, however, specifically asked for a tool that had to work in bunkers. Bunkers where having a solid internet connection was typically the exception. No problem, I read about HTML5 and offline app-cache: I thought I could fix that. More about that soon.

How I face a challenge

When faced a (technical) challenge I typically search for the easiest way out: what would be the slightest change I’d have to make to my battle tested set-up to accommodate for the new challenging feature. In my case this battle tested set-up starts of with the Ruby on Rails stack, which builds on techniques that align well with how I believe the web should work too. RESTful (proper HTTP-messaging and URLs), semantic, CURL-able. And all graceful…

Should I use styled components?

This was originally posted at CoffeeAndOrange

You may have asked yourself if you shouldn’t invest more time getting started with this thing called styled components (or CSS-in-JS). They get heavily promoted in modern front-end application frameworks. And sure, they look interesting.

While it depends may be the only right answer, sometimes you might be simply making things more difficult than really needed. You’re fixing the wrong problem.

Take for example the SCSS code.

$blue = #5DBCD2;

@mixin button-styles($bg-color, $color) {
  background: $bg-color;
  color: $color;
  border: none;
  border-radius: 0.20em;
  &:hover{
      background: darken($bg-color, 6%);
      cursor: pointer;
  }
}

.button {
  @include button-styles(#ddd, black)
}

.button--primary {
  @include button-styles($blue, white)
}

To pair with a simple component along the lines of:

const Buttons = props => ...