testing-library-docs VS Next.js

Testing Library provides a great set of accessibility-focused tools to locating elements when writing tests. It was created by Kent C Dodds, one of my longtime favorite educators on front-end and testing topics. Since the initial release in 2018 as "React Testing Library", it's grown in popularity beyond its React component testing roots. It now has plugins for all major test runners and JavaScript frameworks, and in 2022 some of its patterns were adopted in Playwright's test runner as the recommended way to locate elements.

Probably Enzyme was the first to popularize component testing in React by doing shallow rendering and expecting some things to be there in the React component tree. Then React Testing library came and took component testing to a whole new level.

18.react-testing-library

Jest has long been my favorite got to test runner when it comes to UI unit and integration testing. With tools like React Testing Library (Testing Library framework for React) you get the benefit of very easy to write and maintain tests, as well as a quick and efficient way to run our tests.

I'm writing an intergration test with Testing Library where I'm on a boards dashboard area and a user can click a button to create an item on the board. I'm using an intercepting route to do show the popup form. Once finished the user goes back to their area and should see the created board.

This article uses Jest and React Testing Library. It's okay if you want to use other libraries, the fundamentals in this article will help you there as well.

This is the idea behind Testing-Library from what I understand.

https://testing-library.com/

The Testing Library: The Testing Library offers guidance on best practices for testing user interfaces effectively, with a focus on user-centric testing.

There are great tools like Testing Library that render a single component in a single state and then programmatically inspect the resulting DOM. However, the salient details of the rendered HTML – like color, layout, and scale – are hard to express. So, the tests end up brittle (over-specified) or insufficient (under-specified).

https://github.com/vercel/next.js/discussions/27666 One of them said 'renaming folder to uppercase' might cause trouble. git might not recognize case-sensetive changes by default.

Next.js has long cemented itself as one of the front runners in the web framework world for JavaScript/TypeScript projects so we’re going to be using that. More specifically we’re going to be using V14 of Next.js which allows us to use some exciting new features like Server Actions and the App Router.

Web frameworks like Next.js will usually include this feature, but do check that they set the caching headers correctly!

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.

> It’s important to be aware of what you are getting if you go with React, and what you are getting is a far cry from what a framework would offer, with all the corresponding pros and cons.

Would you like to elaborate on that?

In my experience, with something as great, size/ecosystem-wise as React, there will almost always be at least one "mainstream" package for whatever you might want to do with it, that integrates pretty well. Where a lot of things might come out of the box with a framework, with a library I often find myself just needing to install the "right" package, and from there it's pretty much the same.

For example, using https://angular.io/guide/i18n-overview or installing and using https://react.i18next.com/

Or something like https://angular.io/guide/form-validation out of the box, vs installing and using https://formik.org/

Or perhaps https://angular.io/guide/router vs https://reactrouter.com/en/main

Even adding something that's not there out of the box is pretty much the same, like https://primeng.org/ or https://primereact.org/

React will typically have more fragmentation and therefore also choice, but I don't see those two experiences as that different. Updates and version management/supply chain will inevitably be more of a mess with the library, admittedly.

Now, projects like Next https://nextjs.org/ exist and add what some might regard as the missing pieces and work well if you want something opinionated and with lots of features out of the box, but a lot of those features (like SSR) are actually pretty advanced and not always even necessary.

Next.js: For the website and the admin dashboard

Until the time of writing, there is no official example of how to enable runtime environmental variables in a Dockerized Next.js app, as utilizing unstable_noStore would only dynamically evaluate variables on the server (node.js runtime). There is also an interesting discussion regarding this topic on GitHub.

next.js is a very popular React framework. remix-adonisjs includes more functionality through the AdonisJS backend ecosystem, and should be easier to self-host and self-manage.

Cheryl Murphy is not only a dedicated full-stack web developer skilled in technologies like React, Next.js, and NestJs but also a community-driven professional who recently took on the role of volunteer project team lead at Web Dev Path. With a dual Bachelor's degree in Computing and Chemical Engineering from Monash University, Cheryl’s journey in tech is marked by a passion for building accessible solutions and a commitment to fostering community within tech.

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