vite for
- transpiling typescript
- bundling the final "package" that is useb by the webview
- running a dev server with hot-reloading
- configured with the vite.config.ts file in this directory
pnpm for managing frontend dependency packages

There are a handful of dependency packages that we use directly in the frontend.

picocss for basic CSS while developing
lit for a simple but powerful wrapper around Web Components

Lastly, there are some dependencies that only benefit development

tsserver comes bundled with vscode and can be used as an LSP with other editors using typescript-language-server
- Used for autocomplete, syntax highlighting, etc.
- This can be configured with the tsconfig.json file in the root of the project
  - NOTE: your configuration should align with the vite config so you get in-editor feedback that aligns with how the build will be done.

Development

Ideally, you would use the frontend in the wails app as the frontend depends on the Go bindings generated by Wails. You can do this by running wails dev in the root of the YellowJacket repo.

If you want to run the frontend standalone, make sure the Wails go bindings have been generated with wails generate modules. Then, you can run pnpm dev to run the vite dev server. For more information on what commands are available, refer to package.json.

Code

Web Components

Our frontend is based off of Web Components, a standard that provides native browser encapsulation of components that can include HTML, CSS and Javascript all together. Instead of writing these components manually in Javascript, we utilize lit as a wrapper library.

Typescript

To better integrate with our tooling and to provide a better developer experience with strong typing, we have written all functional frontend code in Typescript. Vite serves as our Typescript transpiler.

Important Files and Directories

NOTE: most of these directories have aliases defined in tsconfig.json and vite.config.ts so that we may refer to them by shorthand when importing.

index.html and index.js is the entrypoint for the frontend. The first page that loads.
wailsjs/go Go code bindings generated by wails reside here
wailsjs/runtime the Wails runtime code needed to use Wails features
src all app code resides here
src/assets static assets like fonts, images and icons
src/components lit components that are used to compose the application
src/pages pages that serve as other entrypoints for the application that can be navigated to