Our great sponsors
-
-
SurveyJS
Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.
-
I've found libraries like Zod useful when interacting with external data sources like a database. Slonik[1] uses Zod to define the types expected from a SQL query and then performs runtime validation on the data to ensure that the query is yielding the expected type.
I don't think it's necessary to use Zod/runtime validation everywhere, but it's a nice tool to have on hand.
[1]https://github.com/gajus/slonik
Zod is great. It has some weaknesses - you can't just reuse types from external libraries; it can be verbose.
There are some libraries that provide a cleaner experience (e.g. typescript-is/typia). But they rely either on code generation or extending the TypeScript compiler while Zod just makes do with some clever typing.
TypeScript itself will never integrate something like this as it goes against their design goals[1].
[1] https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/wiki/TypeScript-Desi...
zod or yup gets you quite a bit of the way there in practice - when you would reach for a Typescript type, making it in zod instead is more verbose but gives that runtime layer.
But for those who actually want full-stack non-stripped runtime type reflection based on Typescript syntax alone... https://deepkit.io/ - https://deepkit.io/blog/introducing-deepkit-framework - is a really promising and cool project.
It patches the typescript compiler (which pointedly considers runtime type information out of scope) with its own type compiler that emits a bespoke bytecode that is executed in a bespoke VM to communicate runtime type information to both server and client as needed. https://docs.deepkit.io/english/runtime-types.html
And from that baseline, there are very cool things you can do like an ORM entirely based on type annotations https://docs.deepkit.io/english/database.html or strongly-typed RPCs https://docs.deepkit.io/english/rpc.html .
It's very much in the alpha stage, but it's really well thought out - there's a tremendous degree of care the developer is taking towards code cleanliness and developer experience. I'm torn between wishing this project to have a fully funded team and take the world by storm, vs. "letting them cook" so to speak and seeing the developer experience unfold organically. Either way, it's a breath of fresh air into the Typescript ecosystem!