QuasarConf 2022: behind the scenes and talks guide

The official Quasar conference was held on Saturday 9th July 2022. It was the second edition and Dreamonkey participated with talks by me and Yusuf. The following is a brief recap of the speakers and topics covered.

After the unfortunate cancellation of QuasarConf 2021, this year the Quasar team was back in the limelight for an event which highlighted the most recent improvements of the framework, its flexibility and the many fields of application.

If you do not already know, Quasar is a JavaScript framework that offers a component library which is unparalleled in performance and flexibility in the entire Vue ecosystem and it allows you, thanks to its CLI, to create cross platform applications (web, desktop, mobile and browser extension) from a single codebase. Quasar is also one of the few frameworks with a stable version that supports both Vue 3, since the start of 2021, and Vite, since the start of 2022.

The event organisation

The organisation of the event kicked off in May and involved various members of the core team:

• Scott Molinari, as for the 2020 edition, was the person who most of all contributed to the success of the event. He managed the general organisation, prepared the articles on the Quasar blog and he dealt with the publication on social media, as well as being the host for the entire conference.
• Our Niccolò Menozzi took care of all needed graphics, as the QuasarConf logo design, articles and posts covers, and the summary images published on social medias for each speaker.
• Luke Diebold helped with the layout of the initial timetables and involved a large part of the community that follows his tutorial videos, as well as keeping morale high despite the little time available.

Dreamonkey (Platinum sponsor of the project, technical since 2019 and economic since 2021) also participated in the event with two talks, one for beginners held by me and one for experts held by Yusuf, in his first appearance on the big screen.

Speaking of talks, the conference this year increased its panel from 8 to 10 speakers, bringing the total duration to 5 hours. We know that there is always little time, so here is a quick review of the talks to help you decide which to watch, divided by speaker relevance in the Quasar ecosystem and in order of appearance.

Quasar core team members

Luke Diebold: creator of QuasarCast and a series of tutorial videos that cover all the Quasar components. He spoke about small adjustments to the organisation and management of components in large scale applications, which can considerably improve productivity and maintainability of a project.

Yusuf Kandemir: TypeScript expert for Quasar, experienced his first appearance at a conference. In the first half of his talk he explained what JSON API is. It is at the basis of the documentation, the auto completion in VSCode and many other functions that improve developer experience while using Quasar. This system is also used to generate TypeScript types and he demonstrated its use in the second part of the talk. Here the slideshow of his talk.

Paolo “Callo” Caleffi: in the last few months I have focused on the integration of automatic testing, in particular of Cypress, and my talk was on the topic of “Component Testing”. After explaining what it is and when it should be used, I showed the related improvements that we have applied and shared some common patterns that we discovered in some of our projects. Here the slideshow of my talk.

Members of the Quasar staff

Bart Duisters: full time Quasar trainer, has created a 0-to-hero course for beginners called CodeCoaching. In his talk Bart showed how the Quasar customisation system works and how to use it to change the theme according to your taste.

Evert van der Weit: contributed to the Cypress Component Testing support, to add tests on the Quasar UI and to the Vitest support. In his talk he showed how to create a transparent wrapper, a common pattern in medium/large projects. This pattern allows you to share default values or common behaviours among all usages of a Quasar component.

Speakers from the community

Hari Pravin: showed his social platform for connecting schools, students, entrepreneurs and investors. Thanks to Quasar his company, Krazy Buddy, was able to launch the beta version of their product just a month after the start of development, an excellent case study which highlights how much Quasar can simplify and speed up the development of extremely complicated and articulate applications.

Bruno Francisco: co-founder of Codotto, showed what Composition API is and how to use it correctly. Using it wisely along with the render function concept, he explained how to easily share code and input field behaviour between different forms without having to create a component for every input field. The pattern presented seemed to me a highly simplified version of LX-Forms, the dynamic form system we released this year.

Mike Alford: in the case study he presented, a Quasar project was optimised so that it could be hosted in an embedded system, where the performance and disk space are extremely limited. The same codebase was then used for the cloud version of the software. This was definitely the presentation that most impressed the audience, showing the ability of Quasar to be used in edge cases in which you wouldn’t expect it to fit. We were impressed too, since in 2021 we worked on a pilot project in the Industrial IoT environment which was very similar with regard to premise and issues to be dealt with, reaching the same conclusions as Mike.

Carlos Gamez: is an electronic and mechanical engineer by trade and developer for passion, as well as the creator of Engineers Tools, a site that collects tools and resources for the engineering world in general. In his presentation he showed how Quasar helped him develop the tools that he and his colleagues use every day for work, considering the ease and speed with which you can create apps from scratch.

Martin Omander: is a Developer Advocate in Google, and he told us about his experience migrating WeelOfNames, a secondary project of his that he has recently re-written using Quasar. The abstractions offered by the framework allowed him to develop quickly, but without tight limitations, and ignore the underlying complexity. His story follows the point of view of a Quasar newbie and can certainly help those who are thinking about using the framework for the first time.

The QuasarConf and making Quasar grow

The 2020 edition was an important milestone for the project, while this year’s conference showed how there is a desire to make QuasarConf a recurring yearly event and a reference point for the community.
My dream, after three years of forced online activity, is to be able to organise similar events live, to allow the community to grow and get to know each other better.

Help the community grow by sharing this article or the link to the recording of the event on social media, it is a small gesture that can have a great impact!

Recently Dreamonkey has also started accepting sponsorships to offer support to companies that use or are thinking of using Quasar. Part of the funds of these sponsorships are donated in turn to Quasar, to allow the project to grow further.
Get in touch with us if you have found a particularly complicated bug in Quasar and you want to see it fixed quickly, if you want to see a new feature developed that you think would be particularly useful or if you are interested in a package of monthly support hours. We also offer services relating to the more “human” aspect, such as training for new developers or workshop set up.