I Shipped...

Our existing SSR agent was recommended for use to allow Server-Side Rendering in Next.js apps. However, I realised that the module itself is written in pure TypeScript, and there’s no good reason for it to be React-only. I modified the Svelte provider, changed the export, and updated the docs, as well as creating a small example app demonstrating how the SSR agent can be used to perform Server-Side Rendering in SvelteKit too.

Most of our users need basic features like authentication and collaboration in their apps, but the guides we have are currently very reference-y and not so much practical implementation guides.

I wrote one guide that covers permissions in Jazz using groups, and how to share data and collaborate on it, and a second which shows how to add passkey authentication into your app using the basic passkey UI.

This should make it easier for users to build an app with the kind of features a real-world app needs.

I created a GetAPIKey snippet which can be re-used all over the docs to have a single, consistent message regarding API keys, and allow us to simplify updating and maintaining all these references.

The snippet can also optionally display how the API key can be used.

We have a CodeGroup component which allows us to display some code with a copy button. This CodeGroup allows us to write special comments like // [!code --:1] to mark a line as ‘removed’. However, these were still being copied, resulting in inaccurate code snippets being copied when users clicked the button.

This PR removes those lines from the copied text.

In principle, according to the WebAuthn spec, cryptographic challenges should be at least 16 bytes long, however in our existing implementation, we had 3 bytes. Although this is technically within spec, it was causing issues for some users using third party passkey managers such as KeePassXC.

This PR builds on previous work and extends the challenge length to 20 bytes.

Due to various challenges with TypeScript generics, we can’t make the $jazz.ensureLoaded, $jazz.set and $jazz.subscribe methods typesafe on discriminated unions. This was causing warnings for one of our adopters in their project.

Although this was previously covered in the docs, it was hidden towards the bottom of the page.

This PR makes it clearer and more prominent.

By default, all credentials are stored under jazz but this makes it impossible to avoid namespace clashes (for example, if you have multiple apps running on the same domain, or in case you want to do local development of more than one Jazz app at a time.

This PR extends on work that was already done to add an option to the Svelte provider, allowing users to specify the prefix under which their credentials will be stored.

When users try to build their applications, TypeScript will compile Jazz as part of their dependencies. However, there are a couple of options that Jazz doesn’t currently work well with. This PR makes it clear to users what options need to be set for compilation to work properly.

Our documentation on how to subscribe to CoValues and load them deeply was complex and difficult to reason about. I simplified, consolidated the examples, and created new illustrative content to make it clearer and easier to understand for users of varying knowledge levels.

We launched our cloud dashboard recently, allowing users to sign up for API keys rather than using their email address. However, across all of our docs, we had verbiage that users should use their email as a temporary API key.

This PR addresses that by changing the wording to drive traffic to our dashboard instead of recommending email addresses.

We have a component in React, React Native and Svelte which can be used to display images with progressive sizes. Although we have an option to show a placeholder, and loading this is normally fast, in case there is a slower load (e.g. network issue, etc.), then there is a flash where the browser’s default placeholder will be displayed (normally just the alt text of the image).

This PR fixes that by instead setting the image to a transparent single pixel (which gets stretched as needed to fit the image based on the size needed by the user). Instead of getting a flash of alt text, nothing will display instead, until the Image Definition is loaded, at which point the default behaviour (show the placeholder or the alt text) will kick in.

Previously, users who wanted to get started with Jazz could either use the command line tool to scaffold a project, or they could work through an installation tutorial which covers the practical side of getting Jazz added to an app, but doesn’t guide folks to an ‘ah ha!’ moment.

I wrote a quickstart guide which works for both React and Svelte, and added a follow up which shows how to use Jazz on the server with a worker. These guides will help users understand the core concepts of Jazz.

Our existing docs explained how to use getters to recursively reference schemas, but weren’t very clear about how to avoid ReferenceErrors caused by schemas creating circular references which resulted in references being evaluated while they were still in the temporal dead zone.

I added some additional keywords and explanation to help folks find these docs more easily when they’re searching, as well as explaining the use cases in a bit more detail.

Web pages often have ‘links’ that can change part of the page without reloading the whole thing. These changes sometimes show different content depending on the link. In Jazz, we can invite people to collaborate on data using links, and we need to notice when someone follows a link.

Previously, the code that checks the URL for invitations only checked once — when the component first appeared on the page. That worked if the person opened the page fresh, but it wouldn’t notice if the URL changed later (for example, if someone clicked a link that added extra info to the URL, called a ‘hash’).

What I did was adjust the code so it also watches for changes to that part of the URL — the hash — so it reacts immediately whenever someone follows a link, not just on page load. That way, no invitation is missed, no matter how the user navigates.