Nuxt Nation 2024
Where intuitive updates meet inspiring new themes
I thoroughly enjoyed attending and watching some of the talks from the 2024 conference on my favourite web framework, Nuxt. The ecosystem is alive, vibrant and growing, and I’m excited about all the new tools, modules, and integrations being built. I don’t know if it’s just me, but to me, many of the design decisions made by the team feel very “intuitive”.
The Magic of Open-source Community
I’m curious and impressed with how this “consistency” between the different packages and modules is achieved in a distributed, open-source community – since completely different teams and people contribute to the various modules and projects.
Standout Updates
Benjamin Canac
Nuxt UI V3: Best of the old updated
This amazing UI framework/library (take that ShadCN) is already amazing and very customisable. Still, the team have rewritten it to use Redux instead of HeadlessUI, which should bring even smoother animations, better accessibility and importantly even more great components.
The shift to TailwindCSS variables brings it in line with the trends in Tailwind and should allow for better control of the styling.
Thorsten Seyschab
TresJS: 3D Made Simple
Finally, 3D in Nuxt gets the declarative treatment it deserves. This new module simplifies complex 3D implementations into elegant, readable code. Perfect for creating immersive web experiences without the usual headaches.
Lucie Haberer
Mobile Development Evolution
As someone who's been using Nuxt+Capacitor+Ionic for building mobile apps and prototypes, seeing this stack showcased in a performance-demanding demo app was re-affirming. The demo of a custom camera app with granular control over ISO and focus settings really highlighted the power and potential of this combination.
Vadim Smirnov
CKEditor Integration
One of the sponsors of the talk is a rich text editor you can plug into Nuxt. Allows for real-time collaboration as well. Potentially super useful if we’re building prototypes of business tools for teams.
Ben Hong
Get Your Head Out of the Cloud — Embracing Local-First Apps with Nuxt
This has quickly become the second biggest trend in the web development community (after AI).
Think offline-capable web apps that seamlessly sync when online, offering:
- Enhanced privacy
- Lightning-fast user-experience
- True data ownership
The crux of this movement is the creation of sync engines (RxDB, Replicache, Powersync, Electric-sync…), which deal with synchronisation of data between your locally stored data and the data in the cloud. In the demo, we’ve seen a Nuxt composable `useDatabase` being used in order to init a local index DB and then sync it with RxDB across the web.
Tech stack from the demo
The missing topic: AI
Surprisingly, as hyped as AI is these days, it was barely mentioned throughout the conference – just two passing references. No AI talks made Peter a sad 😢 boy 👦.
In all seriousness though, whilst it was refreshing to see a clear focus on core Nuxt capabilities, I couldn't help but wonder: where's our Nuxt equivalent of V0+Shadcn for generative UI or a chat-completions plug-in/module or similar?
Final Thoughts
While decidedly technical, the new updates showcased are making it easier and easier to create great and performant user experiences with Nuxt without needing to spend hours on boilerplate, configurations or event handlers. By combining these with a powerful LLM, I believe many non-coding designers might start tipping their toes in the prototyping with code water. I’m very excited about what this future holds.
