Optimizing Performance with Async Components in Vue
When building large-scale applications with JavaScript frameworks, it’s crucial to consider component structure to avoid loading every single component at runtime. This approach can significantly slow down your application, leading to a poor user experience.
The Power of Lazy Loading and Code Splitting
Lazy loading delays the initial load of a component, preventing unnecessary resources from loading until users navigate to where they are needed. Code splitting, a feature originally provided by webpack, allows you to split your code into various bundles that can be used only when needed. Vue performs code splitting via dynamic imports, enabling asynchronous loading of components.
Creating a Basic Component in Vue
To demonstrate the benefits of async components, let’s create a basic book donation page. We’ll start by creating a Book component and replacing the contents of App.vue with a static import. This means the Book component loads every time we load our application.
The Drawbacks of Static Imports
As our app grows, loading every single component at runtime becomes burdensome. Users won’t interact with every piece of functionality in our application, so it makes sense to only serve them what they need. This is where lazy loading and code splitting techniques come into play.
Implementing Async Components
Let’s implement async components in our App.vue component using dynamic imports. This will enable us to load the Book component asynchronously. By examining the Network tab in our browser devtools, we can see that the async component is loaded only when needed.
Building a Book Donation App with Async Components
Let’s create a basic book donation app to demonstrate how async components can be leveraged. We’ll use vue-material to style the app and create a Donate component that loads only when the user clicks the donate button.
Error Handling with Async Components
Async components should be simple to load quickly. However, it’s helpful to define loading and error components to handle loading status and display error messages when needed. We can test these states by setting the timeout property to 0 and attempting to load the app.
The Benefits of Async Components
Using async components is key to maintaining optimal performance in large-scale apps. They not only ensure quicker load times but also help detect errors more efficiently since components are scoped and passed around as functions.
Experience Your Vue Apps Like a User
Debugging Vue.js applications can be challenging, especially when there are dozens of mutations during a user session. LogRocket provides a solution by recording everything that happens in your Vue apps, including network requests, JavaScript errors, performance problems, and more. This allows you to aggregate and report on what state your application was in when an issue occurred.