Let's talk about the two Vue state management libraries Pinia and Vuex. Which one should I use?

This article will talk about Vue state management and introduce two Vue state management libraries: Pinia and Vuex. I hope it will be helpful to you!

Vuex and Pinia are standard Vue.js libraries for managing Vue.js application state. Let’s compare their code, language, features and community support.

Without the right libraries, it can be difficult for developers to manage the state of their applications. Vuex and Pinia are standard Vue.js libraries for handling conditions in applications. Both libraries are great for state management, but due to their excellent features and functionality, choosing which library to use for your project takes time and can be frustrating. Well, we will take a look at why one is the best in this article.

In this article, we will look at the code comparison, their variants, functionality, and which one is recommended to use to manage your state application with real code examples for better understanding. We'll also consider each product's language, features, and community support.

Introduction to Pinia and Vuex

I will briefly summarize Vuex and Pinia. If you want a more thorough explanation, I recommend reading the Vuex documentation and Pinia documentation. [Related recommendations: vuejs video tutorial, web front-end development]

What is Pinia?

Pinia is a new state management library that helps you manage and store response data and state across components in Vue.js applications. Pinia was created by Eduardo San Martin Morote, one of the core Vue team members.

Pinia uses the new reactive system to build an intuitive and fully typed state management system.

The new features introduced in the library were one of the factors that contributed to Pinia’s recommendation. Overall, Pinia appears lightweight, simple, and easy to master. It has everything to make programming in Vue 3 and Vue 2 universal. So this is an ideal opportunity to try out Pinia.

What is Vuex?

Vuex is a state management pattern and library built as a centralized store that helps you maintain the state of all components present in your Vue application. Vuex follows rules that ensure your state mutates to predicted criteria.

One of the things that makes Vuex more powerful is that components get their state from the Vuex store and can respond to changes in store state quickly and efficiently.

Although Vuex is a state management library that maintains your store, it is recommended that you are familiar with or have built a large-scale SPA. If you have no experience, Vuex can be verbose and intimidating.

If your application is extensive, you need to manage complex data flows, and you have nested components, you can use Vuex. Check out the official documentation for more information on when to use Vuex.

Features of Pinia

One of the differences between Pinia and Vuex is that Pinia is a "modular design", in other words, it is built to have multiple stores, while Vuex only has one store. In these stores you can have submodules. In addition to this, Pinia allows each of these modules to be imported directly into the required components from their store.

Modular Design

If you are a Vue developer and have used Vuex to manage the state of your application, you will notice that Vuex There is only one store. In this store you can include multiple modules in it. Using Pinia, you can store each of these modules in one place and import them directly into components when needed.

This method allows the bundler to automatically code-split them and provide better TypeScript inference.

Full development tool support

Pinia provides development tool support to help you build and debug easily with this library. When we install Pinia, it automatically hooks into our Vue.js development tools and lets us track changes made to our store, which gives us smooth access across Vue.js versions (Vue 2 and Vue3) developer experience.

Pinia is intuitive

Pinia provides a simple API that makes writing your store as simple and organized as creating Components are the same. This means there is less boilerplate and concepts to master compared to Vuex solutions.

Pinia is extensible

Pinia also provides a complete plug-in system with features such as trading and local storage synchronization, suitable for Cases where Pinia's default behavior is insufficient.

TypeScript Support

Pinia offers better TypeScript support than Vuex, with Javascript autocomplete, which makes the development process simple.

Pinia is lightweight

Pinia weighs only 1 KB, making it easy to incorporate into your projects. This may improve your application performance.

Features of Vuex

Modules

When your application scales , traversal becomes difficult. However, using Vuex modules you can split your store into multiple files based on domain functionality and access the state loop from the module in that specific namespace.

Development Tools Support

The Vuex tab in Vue devtools allows us to view status and track our changes. This allows us to quickly evaluate how our program performs and debug errors.

Hot reload

Vuex supports the hot reload function. It uses webpack's hot module replacement API to quickly reload when you develop. Contains your mutations, modules, actions and getters.

TypeScript Support

If you want to write a TypeScript storage definition, Vuex can provide types for it and make it easier to implement. It has a default TypeScript configuration and requires no additional setup.

Code comparison between Pinia and Vuex

Pinia is a lightweight library that helps you manage reactive state throughout your application. Compared to Vuex, the Pinia API is easy to learn, making your code easier to read.

Let's take a look at a code comparison for managing our state using Pinia and Vuex:

Vuex

In this example we'll look at a Simple Vuex store that tracks the status of to-do list items:

import { createStore } from 'vuex'const TodoListstore = createStore({
  state() {
    return {
      todoListItems: []
    }
  },
  actions: {
    addNewList({ commit }, item) {
    {
      commit('createNewItem', item)
    }
  },
  mutations: {
    createNewItem(state, item) {
      state.todoListItems.push(item)
    }
  }})

If you look at the code above, you can see three actions in the Vuex store: state, action, and mutation. The state returns the current todoListItems, the action submits a mutation to create a new item, and finally, the mutation creates the new item and adds it to the list. As you build a larger application, you may realize that actions and mutations are relatively similar, resulting in redundant code because each state change requires a boilerplate.

Pinia

Using Pinia Simple API, you can eliminate mutations and redundant code. Let’s look at a code example to see what the previous code looks like when you implement it using Pinia:

import { defineStore } from 'pinia'Export const useListStore = defineStore('list', {
  state() => ({
    return {
      todoListItems: []
    }
  }),
  actions: {
    addNewList() {  
      this.todoListItems.push(item)
    }
  }})

The above example is simple code of how the Pinia API works when managing application state. Using Pinia, we removed the mutation and updated it directly into our actions.

Note: In the code example above, we don't need to track our items when we submit them directly to our action.

Pros and Cons of Pinia and Vuex

Pinia and Vuex are excellent tools for controlling application state, but one must have what the other has. Some features are not available. Let's see what they are.

Benefits of Pinia

• Pinia allows you to modify your store without reloading the page.
• It provides TypeScript support and good autocomplete functionality in JavaScript.
• Pinia provides devtool support, which helps enhance the developer experience using the tool.
• Pinia only has states, getters and actions. No mutations are required.
• With Pinia, you can store state in one place and pass it to their components on request.
• It is a lightweight library weighing 1 KB.
• It provides server-side rendering support and auto-type modules with no extra work.
• Pinia is compatible with Vue 2 and Vue 3.

Disadvantages of Pinia

• Compared to Vuex, it does not have huge community support and solutions.
• Pinia does not support debugging features such as time travel and editing.

Advantages of Vuex

• Vuex has mutations, getters and actions.
• Compared to Pinia, Vuex has great community support.
• Vuex supports debugging features such as time travel and editing.

Disadvantages of Vuex

• It is not TypeScript friendly.
• You can only use it for large spas.

#Which should I use: Pinia or Vuex?

Well, this is where it gets more challenging, because there are still some projects that require using Vuex for stateful applications, even though Pinia is the new recommended state management library. It has several valuable features that Vuex does not have.

Vuex is still an ideal solution for building large SPAs, as it is quite verbose for people building small to medium-sized applications.

Same goes for Pinia. Nonetheless, if you need all the listed features like devtool support, TypeScript support, and easy management of stateful applications, then Pinia is the best solution – it provides you with a smooth development experience.

If you are building a less complex application, whether it is medium to extensive, you can use Pinia as it weighs about 1 KB.

Conclusion

Due to the variety of features, choosing between Vuex and Pinia can be confusing when it comes to managing application state. However, both frameworks are well suited for managing stateful applications. This article briefly compares their features, functionality, and impact on your code. After reading this article, maybe you will be able to find the library that works for you.

(Learning video sharing: vuejs introductory tutorial, Basic programming video)

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