Build a Metaframework in 30 Minutes or Less

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Metaframeworks: you're probably using one already and may or may not love the experience - but what if I told you they aren’t rocket science?

In this talk, we’re ditching the buzzwords and over-complication to build one from scratch—yes, you heard that right.

Armed with Vite, Vinxi, Nitro, a pinch of vanilla JavaScript, and a healthy dose of curiosity, we’ll piece together the routing, rendering, and all the essentials you’ve been letting metaframeworks handle for you.

Expect aa crash course in understanding the tech you use every day. By the end, you might just be asking: Should I just roll one myself? Aand no, you shouldn't. But it's sure fun building one and understanding what makes them tick, no?

This talk has been presented at React Summit 2025, check out the latest edition of this React Conference.

FAQ

Playwright is a popular end-to-end testing tool that is easy to install and supports generating tests without writing code. It includes features like visual comparisons, snapshots, API testing, and more, providing a comprehensive testing solution.

Playwright can help by providing tools for end-to-end testing even in complex or outdated codebases. It supports auto-waiting and web-first assertions, making it easier to write reliable and predictable tests.

Advanced features of Playwright include handling visual comparisons, snapshots, API testing, component testing, and supporting multiple user authentication and parallelism out of the box.

Playwright improves test report readability by using the step decorator to group lower-level actions into high-level, understandable steps, and integrating with tools like Allure Reports for detailed, user-friendly test reports.

When selecting a testing strategy, consider the specific needs of your codebase. Strategies like the testing pyramid, testing ice cream cone, and testing mushroom offer different focuses, and the right choice depends on your project's context and requirements.

Playwright incorporates AI features like 'copy error as AI prompt' and the MCP server for large language models to interact with Playwright APIs, enhancing the testing process.

You can optimize test performance by running tests in full parallel mode and increasing the number of workers. Playwright's network cache plugin can also be used to reduce test running time by caching results.

Playwright offers a best-in-class developer experience with built-in debuggers, VS Code extensions, screenshots, reports, videos, and a trace viewer that provides detailed information on test failures.

Test isolation is crucial in Playwright to prevent dependencies between tests, ensuring that tests can run in any order without failing due to shared state or resources.

The 'testing mushroom' strategy focuses on end-to-end testing to meet regulation requirements and provide a safety net for refactoring. It's designed to evolve as more is learned about the system being tested.

Darko Bozhinovski
Darko Bozhinovski
26 min
13 Jun, 2025

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Video Summary and Transcription
The Talk covers the importance of Playwright as an end-to-end testing tool with AI capabilities and a supportive community. It addresses challenges in testing specialized domains like healthcare analytics and explores modern testing strategies like the testing pyramid and testing diamond. The implementation of the testing mushroom strategy for end-to-end testing, optimization of test dependency handling, and enhancement of test report readability and speed are discussed. Speed optimization, mocking strategies, test performance enhancement, parallelization, flaky test handling, decorators, test user registration, audience engagement, testing stability, sharding considerations, and gratitude for engaging discussions on testing strategies are also highlighted.

1. Understanding Playwright Testing Tool

Short description:

We've discussed the importance of testing in 2025, focusing on Playwright as an end-to-end testing tool with powerful features and AI capabilities. Playwright aims to simplify test writing and enhance the testing experience, offering a practical approach and a supportive community.

We've wipecoded our application real quick, or we inherited a legacy large codebase. How do we test it? Is testing easy in 2025? That's a tricky question. And before I jump in, a quick check. Can you please raise your hand if you worked with Playwright before? Great. It's like almost half of the audience, maybe even more.

For the rest of us, a brief introduction to Playwright. Playwright is a very popular end-to-end testing tool. It's very easy to install. With just one command, you get the default browsers, configuration, example test, and even GitHub action. It comes with Code Jam. It allows you to generate tests without writing any code at all.

When tests inevitably fail, Playwright has best-in-class developer experience with built-in debugger, VS Code extension, screenshots, reports, videos, and my favorite, the trace viewer. The trace viewer is a one-stop shop for any test failure. It provides all the test steps along with screenshots, errors, console logs, network requests, and basically everything that we usually check in the browser dev tools. Of course, the mandatory AI slide. Playwright has a couple of nice AI features, copy error as AI prompt, and Playwright MCP server to allow large language models to communicate with Playwright APIs.

Let me give you a quick demo. Here, I'm asking Courser to write a quick conference review draft for my blog. Courser asks Playwright MCP to fetch a conference agenda and Playwright returns an accessibility snapshot of the page, something that is very easy for Courser to digest. As a result, Courser generates a good first draft, even for the talks that were not presented yet. Very cool. Of course, Playwright's main goal is to help us write reliable, predictable tests. And Playwright is a very practical tool. It comes with auto-weighting and web-first assertions. Authentication and multi-user comes out of the box, the same with parallelism and sharding. Finally, it has a great community that provides community plugins, best practices, and integrations with other tools.

2. Challenges of Testing in Specialized Domains

Short description:

Playwright offers practical testing solutions with auto-weighting, web-first assertions, and community support. Joining Aetion, a healthcare analytics company, presented challenges in testing within a highly specialized domain. From complex codes to evolving React components, testing in such environments requires meticulous attention to detail and adaptation to legacy systems.

And Playwright is a very practical tool. It comes with auto-weighting and web-first assertions. Authentication and multi-user comes out of the box, the same with parallelism and sharding. Finally, it has a great community that provides community plugins, best practices, and integrations with other tools. All in all, Playwright checks all the boxes to make testing easy.

At least, this is what I thought when a year ago, I joined a team at Aetion, a healthcare analytics company that offers a range of products for data scientists in the healthcare sector. It's a highly specialized and regulated business domain that probably has an acronym for pretty much everything in the world. Let me give you an example. In the International Classification of Diseases, that's a real thing, there is a code W6162xd that literally means struck by duck, subsequent encounter. And in such specialized business domain, our team was asked to cover all the major features with automated tests for regulation purposes. The scope included 64 epics of tests.

I still remember this number. For a non-professional like me, the UI looked like gazillion checkboxes, acronyms, tables with random numbers all around, powered by a 5-year-old React application and a 10-year-old Java back-end. Java had its own story going from monolith to microservices, then back, leaving us with a bunch of legacy outdated APIs. But that's for another time. For now, let's focus on React. As the product was evolving, some of the components have grown over a thousand lines of code with those huge use effects, with missing dependencies, dependencies, and all that stuff. React version 17, most of the code untyped. ESLint and Prettier got lost during cloud migration.

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