Shadow JAM

Project Abandoned

This project is no longer being developed. If you are looking for a toolkit to build super lightweight websites then I would highly suggest taking a look at https://www.11ty.io/ and https://sapper.svelte.technology/. You get everything out of the box that this project was aiming at doing for smaller websites with a payload size of JS that this project would never be able to reach. If you are looking to build rich data intensive applications I would highly suggest taking a look at https://fulcro.fulcrologic.com/ or https://github.com/Day8/re-frame which is a much easier to get started with in CLJS and more employable framework.

Starter (Not Production Ready)

A JAMstack build tool for developing PWA's with Clojurescript. This build tool is focused on capturing Better Web Practices.

• Better Performance
• Better Accessibility
• Better Developer Experience
• Better Project Completion Times

Demo at https://shadow-jam-starter.netlify.com/

Bootstrapped using the Browser Quickstart for Shadow CLJS

Inspiration & Prior art: GatsbyJS, Next, Preact-cli, SapperJS

Goals

• Follow the PRPL pattern
• 100/100 on Lighthouse audits out of the box
• Work well as a JAMstack template on Netlify

Required Software

• node.js (v10.3.0+)
• Java JDK (10+) or Open JDK (10+)

Running the Build Tool

Clone the repository. Then cd into it.

npm install
npx shadow-cljs server

This runs the shadow-cljs server process which all following commands will talk to. Just leave it running and open a new terminal to continue.

The first startup takes a bit of time since it has to download all the dependencies and do some prep work. Once this is running we can get started.

shadow-cljs run jam/watch

This will begin the compilation of the configured :app build and re-compile whenever you change a file.

To do a production release. Stop the watch process. Set up your service worker by running.

npx workbox wizard --injectManifest

Then run.

shadow-cljs run jam/release

Now the same url will have a production release that can be used for testing locally eg. Chrome Lighthouse Audits.

Why PWA's?

Progressive Web Apps are installable and live on the user's home screen, without the need for an app store https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/

The browser can do a lot. It has a high level of device integration (https://whatwebcando.today/) and with Web Assembly (reportedly running at 1.2x native code execution) it will be able to do a lot more in the future.

They are also installable on Desktop with Chrome right now. https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/05/dpwa

The following images are from Google IO talks and illustrates the size differences of a native application to a web application.

Resources

Performance

• Front-End Performance Checklist - https://github.com/thedaviddias/Front-End-Performance-Checklist#---------front-end-performance-checklist-

• Fast By Default: Modern Loading Best Practices (Chrome Dev Summit 2017) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_srJ7eHS3IM

• Web performance made easy (Google I/O '18) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv-l3-tJgGk&list=PLOU2XLYxmsIInFRc3M44HUTQc3b_YJ4-Y&index=46

• Speed Matters: Designing for Mobile Performance - http://www.awwwards.org/brainfood-mobile-performance-vol3.pdf

• Smashing Magazine Performance Checklist 2018 - https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/01/front-end-performance-checklist-2018-pdf-pages/

  • SpeedIndex < 1250
  • TTI < 5s on 3G
  • Critical file size budget < 170Kb.
  • The first 14~15Kb of the HTML is the most critical payload chunk

Typography

• Agreat write up on why font sizes should be bigger - https://blog.marvelapp.com/body-text-small/

• Variable fonts allows multiple font style variations with a single font file - https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/design-and-ux/typography/variable-fonts/

• More people change their font size in the browser than use edge - https://medium.com/@vamptvo/pixels-vs-ems-users-do-change-font-size-5cfb20831773

• How to set up a System font stack so you can leverage the fonts already available on the system - https://woorkup.com/system-font/

  • system-ui value for font-family has 84.06% global compatibility

  • Lean towards super font families when using Google fonts etc to ensure text can be read in the maximum number of languages

Accessibility

Disabled Javascript

• https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/05/using-the-web-with-javascript-turned-off/

• https://blockmetry.com/blog/javascript-disabled

Interesting developments with React

• Using React Suspense to reduce placeholders and remove ReactDOM from bundle - https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=851&v=z-6JC0_cOns
• Using Prepack to generate HTML: React and ReactDOMServer are completely compiled away - https://github.com/trueadm/ssr-with-prepack-hackathon

TODO

• Pre-render HTML
• Inline critical CSS
• Optionally subset Google Fonts (possible to subset local fonts with more dependencies)
• Works for index HTML on release when true in config
• Use lazysizes for lazy loading images
• Local image manipulation using Sharp in a similar way to gatsby-transformer-sharp
• Optionally inline if under 10kb as Data URI Gatsby does
• Generate Service Workers using Workbox
• Setup HTTPS for Shadow-cljs
• Use Hicada instead of Sablono to provide new features
• Optionally run Lighthouse audits on public pages locally
• Option to create static websites that have either no JS, minimal JS or the React Runtime
• Automatic code splitting for routes
• Assess Guess JS integration
• Assess DataURI optimisations for SVG with mini-svg-data-uri
• Process images using SQIP to generate SVG's in a similar way to Gatsby SQIP plugin.
  • Use 'svgo' to optimise the SVG if necessary
  • Use 'mini-svg-data-uri' on static images above the fold and inline into HTML.