shadcn/ui VS zod

Shadcn/ui: I've never tried it before but have always wanted to switch from MaterialUI

Honestly the ergonomics of heavily customizable generic component libraries aren't great. Copy and pasting a simple component to make the specific customizations you want helps reduce JS ecosystem churn and dependency pain. Popularity of libraries like shadcn/ui [1] are good acknowledgements of that.

[1] https://ui.shadcn.com/

shadcn/ui

This model is very similar to the popular shadcn workflow. After files are creating in your local repo, you can modify them and check them into source control.

Link: https://ui.shadcn.com/

One of my biggest fears as a frontend dev is to build UIs that are inaccessible for people. It's easy to take so many things for granted.

The good news is you get a lot of accessibility out of the box using native html. For higher abstractions I love working with accessibility first libraries like Shadcn (which is built on top of Radix): https://ui.shadcn.com/

For development of the UI components, we tried something new. Vercel has this new AI tool called v0.dev that allows developers to take advantage of shadcn/ui and Tailwind using nothing but words, which can then be easily downloaded to your local project using nothing but a simple npx command.

Shadcn stands out among the many UI frameworks and libraries as a helpful resource for developers looking for an open-source, customizable way to create stunning and useful user interfaces. Shadcn is a tool to help you build your component library. These are components that you can copy and paste into your apps.

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.