Files
yellowjacket/frontend
yonlu 620151aa41 perf(library): load a collection when a view needs it, not at startup
All four collections were fetched at DOMContentLoaded and refetched on
every invalidation, whichever view was showing. On a 26 138-track
library the track list was 20.5 MB of that, and encoding it cost the
backend ~170 MB of transient allocation — paid by someone looking at
Home, which draws none of it.

- The store warms only albums, artists and genres, on idle after first
  paint: 1.6 MB together, and what made those views instant.
- A nav item prefetches on hover and on keyboard focus, which is the
  ~100 ms before the click that a cold open would otherwise wait.
- An invalidation refetches what something had loaded, and nothing
  else — a scan no longer loads the track list of a library whose
  Tracks view nobody has opened.
- `index.html`'s first-paint `<track-list>` is `view-hidden`, and
  `index.ts` no longer activates it: it is markup, not a decision about
  which view the launch lands on, and activating it was what fetched
  the whole list for a landing on Home. The track list itself loads on
  view activation, which the shell drives.

Measured on 50 000 tracks: backend RSS at rest 543 → 296 MB, peak 571 →
296 MB, Go heap held 361 → 125 MB, JS heap 31.8 → 18 MB, binding bytes
at rest 35.9 → 12.1 MB, heap after a browse 36.5 → 22.7 MB. Tracks
first open 26 ms; slowest view open 57 ms.

Closes #280
2026-10-06 01:43:00 -04:00
..
2025-03-28 11:43:14 -05:00

YellowJacket Frontend

This directory contains the frontend for YellowJacket.

Dependencies

There are a couple of tools that are required to build and use the frontend.

  • 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.

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