firebaseui-web VS zod

One great product that can be used for authentication is Clerk but we currently use the default Firebase authentication system as it works pretty well. Firebase even has a separate package called firebaseui-web that helps one set up Firebase authentication without writing any UI code.

In this example, you can see how flexible and customizable the library is. For full documentation, you can see the github repository page here.

Firebase authentication allows for the complete customization of the entire authentication experience for beginners with speed and ease. Nobody sets out to build a bespoke authentication solution unless your business is identity like Auth0. Firebase authentication provides an open-source user interface (UI) library which streamlines building diverse authentication flows for a great user experience. These flows come with the wisdom of years of UX research optimizing the authentication on Google, Youtube, and Android to get you started.

SvelteKit, Serverless, Backendless.com

SvelteKit[1] is a framework for SvelteJS (like Next.js is a framework for ReactJS). I've tried both Svelte and React. Svelte seems to be more elegant and lets me implement my ideas faster with less code. Svelte is very flexible; SvelteKit adds some opinions on how to do things like routing.

SvelteKit also embraces the serverless paradigm[2] (AKA JAMstack[3]). Although a node.js server is still an option, you can also have pages rendered in serverless functions or pre-rendered at build time. Even static pages can be "hydrated" on the client so they are not totally static. So this results in fine-grained SSR (server-side rendering) at the page level. The two main reasons for SSR are performance (especially on mobile devices) and SEO.

Backendless[4] is a VADP/MBaaS. This platform offers a lot of services, but the main one I'm looking at is authentication/identity. I was looking for an authentication service that supports anonymous guest login, social login, as well as traditional email/password login. The other contenders were Google Firebase (slow, and confusing sign in/sign up flow[5]) and AWS Cognito (too complicated/difficult to use). Auth0 was a contender, but they don't support guest logins.

[1]: https://kit.svelte.dev

[2]: https://www.serverless.com

[3]: https://jamstack.org

[4]: https://backendless.com

[5]: https://github.com/firebase/firebaseui-web/issues/665

They provide a web library too - see https://github.com/firebase/firebaseui-web

[Zod Documentation](https://zod.dev/) [Zod Error Handling](https://zod.dev/ERROR_HANDLING?id=error-handling-in-zod) [React-Hook-Form Documentation](https://react-hook-form.com/get-started) [Hookform Resolvers](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@hookform/resolvers)

This is a very fair comment, and you seem open to understanding why types are useful.

"problems that are due to typing" is a very difficult thing to unpack because types can mean _so_ many things.

Static types are absolutely useless (and, really, a net negative) if you're not using them well.

Types don't help if you don't spend the time modeling with the type system. You can use the type system to your advantage to prevent invalid states from being represented _at all_.

As an example, consider a music player that keeps track of the current song and the current position in the song.

If you model this naively you might do something like: https://gist.github.com/shepherdjerred/d0f57c99bfd69cf9eada4...

In the example above you _are_ using types. It might not be obvious that some of these issues can be solved with stronger types, that is, you might say that "You rarely see problems that are due to typing".

Here's an example where the type system can give you a lot more safety: https://gist.github.com/shepherdjerred/0976bc9d86f0a19a75757...

You'll notice that this kind of safety is pretty limited. If you're going to write a music app, you'll probably need API calls, local storage, URL routes, etc.

TypeScript's typechecking ends at the "boundaries" of the type system, e.g. it cannot automatically typecheck your fetch or localStorage calls return the correct types. If you're casting, you're bypassing the type systems and making it worthless. Runtime type checking libraries like Zod [0] can take care of this for you and are able to typecheck at the boundaries of your app so that the type system can work _extremely_ well.

[0]: https://zod.dev/ note: I mentioned Zod because I like it. There are _many_ similar libraries.

Zod is an open-source schema declaration and validation library that emphasizes TypeScript. It can refer to any data type, from simple to complex. Zod eliminates duplicative type declarations by inferring static TypeScript types and allows easy composition of complex data structures from simpler ones. It has no dependencies, is compatible with Node.js and modern browsers, and has a concise, chainable interface. Zod is lightweight (8kb when zipped), immutable, with methods returning new instances. It encourages parsing over validation and is not limited to TypeScript but works well with JavaScript as well.

Zod is a TypeScript-first schema declaration and validation library. It helps create schemas for any data type and is very developer-friendly. Zod has the functional approach of "parse, don't validate." It supports coercion in all primitive types.

Link: https://zod.dev/

You can check out their documentation here.

You can learn more about Zod on their website here.

In JS, it's a good idea anyway to use some JSON parsing library instead of JSON.parse.

With Zod, you can use z.bigint() parser. If you take the "parse any JSON" snippet https://zod.dev/?id=json-type and change z.number() to z.bigint(), it should do what you are looking for.

We will validate our input using client-side zod. Zod handles TypeScript-first schema validation with static type inference. This means that it will not only validate your fields, it will also set types on validated fields.