Vuex is the go-to state management library for Vue applications, and the Vue core team has some big plans to make it better than ever. Here’s a preview of where they are looking to take it.
Vuex is the solution for state management in Vue applications. The next version — Vuex 4 — is making its way through the final steps before officially releasing. This release will bring full compatibility with Vue 3, but doesn’t add new features. While Vuex has always been a powerful solution, and the first choice for many developers for state management in Vue, some developers had hoped to see more workflow issues addressed. However, even as Vuex 4 is just getting out the door, Kia King Ishii (a Vue core team member) is talking about his plans for Vuex 5, and I’m so excited by what I saw that I had to share it with you all. Note that Vuex 5 plans are not finalized, so some things may change before Vuex 5 is released, but if it ends up mostly similar to what you see in this article, it should be a big improvement to the developer experience.
With the advent of Vue 3 and it’s composition API, people have been looking into hand-built simple alternatives. For example, You Might Not Need Vuex demonstrates a relatively simple, yet flexible and robust pattern for using the composition API along with provide/inject to create shared state stores. As Gábor states in his article, though, this (and other alternatives) should only be used in smaller applications because they lack all those things that aren’t directly about the code: community support, documentation, conventions, good Nuxt integrations, and developer tools.
That last one has always been one of the biggest issues for me. The Vue devtools browser extension has always been an amazing tool for debugging and developing Vue apps, and losing the Vuex inspector with “time travel” would be a pretty big loss for debugging any non-trivial applications.
Debugging Vuex with the Vue Devtools. (Large preview)
Thankfully, with Vuex 5 we’ll be able to have our cake and eat it too. It will work more like these composition API alternatives but keep all the benefits of using an official state management library. Now let’s take a look at what will be changing.
#vuex #vue #vuejs #javascript #developer
