One of the great pleasures of writing code is actually not writing code. What's better than finding out that some code you need to write has already been written for you, been used and tested by thousands of developers already, and is freely available for you to use? Chocolate? Maybe.
Velo, as a JavaScript-based environment, affords you the opportunity to take advantage of code packages from the npm registry - the largest registry of code packages in the world.
When using Velo, you can install and use npm packages from a growing number of pre-approved packages in your frontend and backend code. If a package you want to use hasn't been approved yet, you can always request that it be added to the list.
Velo developers have been using all sorts of npm packages to make their lives easier. Here are the top five npm packages installed on Velo sites.
lodash - No surprise here. The top npm package installed on Velo sites is also one of the most popular packages in the npm registry. Lodash contains tons of helpful methods for working with arrays, objects, numbers, strings, and more. You know the feeling when you're trying to do something that should be easy, but for some reason JavaScript makes it nearly impossible? More times than not, Lodash comes to the rescue with a simple method for doing exactly what you want.
@sendgrid/mail - Sending emails from a site is a pretty useful thing to be able to do. Wix offers the Triggered Emails feature which lets you send emails from code. It looks like a lot of Velo developers also want the flexibility of using a third-party service to send emails - and they choose SendGrid. This npm module makes sending emails with the SendGrid API super simple.
moment - We all know JavaScript dates are a pain to work with. The sheer number of libraries for working with dates is proof enough. Everyone has their favorite, but it looks like Moment is having a moment with Velo users. It seems that's bound to change at some point. The Moment team consider their package to be in maintenance mode and recommend that new projects use more modern alternatives.
uuid - Some packages do just one thing and they do it well. This package creates universally unique identifiers (UUIDs) and that's about it. Of course, there are an infinite number of reasons you would need a UUID and it seems Velo users are encountering quite a few of them.
pdf-generator-api - PDFs have been with us since the dawn of civilization and still proving to be one of the most useful document formats. This package lets you create PDF documents using the PDF Generator API.
There are plenty more packages Velo users are taking advantage of every day. Take a look and see what's out there. You might find something that will save you a bit of time. Time you can spend eating chocolate, if that's your thing.
And if you haven't already, sign up for Velo and see what you can build.
