Announcing v1

Today I'm very happy to announce the release of micro-stacks v1.0.0! micro-stacks has been a nights and weekends project for me for over a year, first starting as a project to better understand the inner-workings of Stacks and to be able to build apps with modern frontend tooling like Vite and SkyPack.

For those unaware, micro-stacks is a collection of JavaScript/TypeScript libraries for building robust Stacks based apps.

With this release, there are many important updates that I'm excited to share.

tl;dr#

• new micro-stacks@1.0.0
• new @micro-stacks/client library for managing app-state
• new framework specific bindings:
  • React - @micro-stacks/react
  • Svelte - @micro-stacks/svelte
  • Vue - @micro-stacks/vue
  • Solidjs - @micro-stacks/solidjs
• new docs -> check them out!
• new examples and yarn create ustx
• security audit for core library

New client library#

While working on earlier version of the library, there has always been just one package: micro-stacks. This package contains many sub-modules that are separate, and are broken out based on function, e.g.: micro-stacks/clarity, micro-stacks/transactions, etc. This is great when you know what each module does, but it's less great when you have no idea and there aren't docs explaining all the different functions and what they do. Often I would get feedback from folks that there were too many things to have to think about when wanting to accomplish the foundational functionality that is found in all Stacks apps: authentication, transaction signing, and using Gaia.

With that in mind, I wanted to create a new abstraction on top of all the libraries that would make these functions really easy to use, while also pushing developers towards building apps with more of a focus towards user experience. What I mean by this are things like properly handling sessions in the context of server side rendered applications, or providing feedback when certain actions happen, such as authenticating or signing a transaction.

This new abstraction is a new library: @micro-stacks/client. This package is what handles all user session state within Stacks apps, exposes easy-to-use functions that make use of the current user session like signing transactions, signing messages, Gaia related functions, and encryption/decryption.

This package is the foundation for all framework-specific bindings and provides a much better developer-experience when compared to implementing these functions by hand with the lower-level micro-stacks package.

Framework bindings#

With the creation of @micro-stacks/client, we now have a much higher ability to create framework specific binds for micro-stacks. This means we now have first-class support for all major JavaScript frameworks: React, Preact, Svelte, Vue, and even Solidjs. The API between the framework-specific packages are all very similar, so if you're working on multiple projects that have different requirements, you don't need to re-learn how to interact with micro-stacks.

The framework-specific bindings all use the best-practices for each specific framework, offering reactive state values and performant functions to accomplish everything you need when building apps: authentication, transaction signing, message signing, and storage!

Starter kits#

In addition to new framework-specific bindings, there are now up-to-date examples for all of these frameworks. You can explore these projects here, or get started today by running yarn create ustx to scaffold out any of these starter kits:

React

• react (javascript)
• react-ts (typescript)
• next.js (typescript)
• remix (typescript)

Vue

• vue (javascript)
• vue-ts (typescript)
• nuxt coming soon (typescript)

Preact

• preact (javascript)
• preact-ts

Solid

• solidjs (javascript)
• solidjs-ts

Svelte

• svelte (javascript)
• svelte-ts (typescript)
• sveltekit (typescript)

New documentation#

In addition to the new starter kits, the documentation for micro-stacks has been completely re-written from the ground up, with a focus on the most common path a developer will take when building out a new Stacks app.

Additionally, there are more in-depth guides around building apps with meta-frameworks like Remix and Next.js.

Security audit#

The core micro-stacks package successfully completed a security audit (paid for by the Stacks foundation, thank you!) from KoinFabrik. Thankfully nothing of concern was found. To read the audit and any comments about what was found, check out this page in the GitHub repository.

Looking forward#

My primary goal in working on micro-stacks and all of the additional libraries/documentation has always been to help folks build better Stacks apps. With that in mind, there is so much more I'm excited to build:

• Example apps with Sponsored Transactions
• Example apps with Clarinet built-in
• New ways to build Post Conditions
• New tooling to work with projects like clarigen
• and much more!

Thanks for reading and please reach out with any questions/comments/feature requests on GitHub!