typebox VS class-transformer

The documentation can be found here.

So far I like the commonly used approach in the Typescript community best:

1. Create your Schema using https://zod.dev or https://github.com/sinclairzx81/typebox

2. Generate your Types from the schema. It's very simple to create partial or composite types, e.g. UpdateModel, InsertModels, Arrays of them, etc.

3. Most modern Frameworks have first class support for validation, like is a great example Fastify (with typebox). Just reuse your schema definition.

That is very easy, obvious and effective.

There's a ton of schema validators out there and most devs have their personal favorite. Mine was zod and is now typebox + ajv.

If you're willing to document your API with an OpenAPI schema, then it should be possible to generate TypeScript types based on the OpenAPI schema with something like openapi-typescript. Also, Typebox can generate JSON schemas, maybe it can be used to generate something that the front-end can also use?

Well, I do provide extensibility for those bullet points you've listed to varying degrees (both schema and type representation), as well as offering a reference implementation for expressing a entirely different schema specification under the type system (specifically RFC8927 / JSON Type Definition). Reference implementation here. As for JSDoc, It's supported in code hints.

In setting out to build this service, we wanted to use gRPC for its APIs. We’ve been reaching for REST when building APIs so far, primarily out of necessity, i.e., our public APIs needed auto-generated client SDKs and docs for developers working with them. We built those APIs with Fastify and Typebox but felt burned by a code-first approach to generating an OpenAPI spec. I’ll spare you the details and save that experience/learning for another article. Suffice it to say we love gRPC’s schema-first approach. This blog post summarizes our feelings well

You could try using @sinclair/typebox, it's API is similar to that of zod, but it spits out a JSON schema that you can then use to validate data at runtime and to populate your Swagger docs.

JSON serialization is 200x faster than class-transformer

Also OP can check out class-transformer + class-validator if he want to properly instantiate objects and validate them with precise and verbose output of potential format errors. OP can even go the god tier way by setting up a custom RxJS operator that does that for him easily.

Start by installing the class-transformer and class-validator packages for dto validation (see more in the docs), sharp for image optimization, and the S3 client packages.

View on GitHub

To implement new features, the original class-transformer had to be abandoned, since it does not publish the meta date that it collects. Fork that publishes metadata to the global - https://github.com/petrzjunior/class-transformer (PR: https://github.com/typestack/class-transformer/pull/929)

I really enjoyed using class-transformer and class-validator for this.

The class-validator / class-transform looks really nice for formatting/validation but there is also joi. suretype is attractive since theoretically typeconv could generate jsonSchema for json-schema-faker and Open API docs.