nitric VS zod

If you haven't used the Nitric SDK before, then start with this tutorial.

For all those on the hunt for a framework, Nitric is here for you. It's a multi-language framework that helps teams quickly build cloud applications. Nitric unites backend and infrastructure code and automates the process of provisioning and deploying infrastructure. The first major version brings a bunch of changes including significant improvements to the Nitric CLI to support productive cloud development. There's also new architecture visualizations and a new SDK for building and extending Nitric providers. Congrats to the team on shipping your very first version 🥳.

You may have heard of the open source Nitric framework that my team and I have been developing – it’s a cloud-aware application framework that provides a seamless dev experience and confident cloud deployments. Put simply, Nitric handles the infrastructure and runtime requirements of your application, so you can focus your efforts on building it.

Compare the following diagram to the one shown above. This flow addresses some of the concerns raised previously by using an automation framework to eliminate some of the assets that were originally manually crafted. We’re using our open source Nitric Framework in this example; other tools can be used to automate pieces of this flow as well.

If you haven't used the Nitric SDK before, then start with this tutorial to get your project scaffolded and ready to run.

In this exploration, we created a Profile Management API using Nitric, handled core profile operations, and extended it for image management.

On the server-side, you will typically use Zod validation in your route handlers, immediately after receiving a request. Here's an example using the Nitric framework:

Nitric is a serverless framework for rapidly developing and deploying cloud applications.

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.

A word of warning: while discriminated unions are very powerful, there's an ongoing discussion on whether discriminated unions should be deprecated and replaced with a different API.

I was first introduced to Zod by Adam Bobrow - a colleague of mine and a dear friend. Adam was sick and tired from JavaScript's brittleness, and about two years ago he started migrating our code base to TypeScript. But that wasn't enough for him. He kept complaining: "What good are my types, if some other service decides to send me bad data and breaks my code?". That's when he discovered Zod.