Sapper is a framework built on the foundation of Svelte. Sapper’s primary focus is to speed for rendering servers, preloading links and more. With the combination of Svelte & Sapper delivers websites that are fast and have a small footprint.

Sapper includes all the features of Svelte and builds on them, providing enhanced user experience. Though there is the possibility of adding these features to the Svelte application, using Sapper gets you all those features out of the box and ends up saving time and effort.

Why should you consider Sapper?

As is with everything there are quite a few reasons to use Sapper, we’ll list out a few of them below.

Page Routing

Navigation from one page to another is possible when “URLs” linked-to “pages” are described clearly in the mark-up.

Sapper offers the benefit of this to be done by the directory and file naming protocol. That offers an easier approach to understand than those requiring you to call the library function to configure page routing.

Page Layout

Page layouts eliminate the need to replicate certain columns that are common throughout the app. This ends up saving time in replicating certain parts of the code.

Server-Side Rendering (SSR)

SSR provides an exceptional user experience by loading the HTML for pages on the server rather than the browser. This user experience provided as a result of the page getting rendered before the JavaScript being downloaded.

Code Splitting

Code splitting offers the benefit of the JavaScript linked to a page, only to be download when visited. This is a favourable solution rather than downloading the entire application code when visiting the first page.

Pre-Fetching

By predicting the next page, a user will visit, pre-fetching offers faster page download. This is based on the mouse movements and hover, and can be configured on every page. When a user hovers over a certain page link, Sapper automatically starts to download the required JavaScript.

Offline Usability

Similar to React, Sapper uses a Service Worker to provide offline usability of web applications, of course in a limited sense. This is achieved by retrieving the cached versions of certain files when connectivity is lost.

Understanding how Sapper works

Just like Svelte applications, Sapper applications can be built using a template.

Sapper apps are handled by a server-based library known as “Polka”. Polka is more efficient in terms of download size and performance in comparison to Express. Sapper apps offer the choice of being modified to use express.

Sapper generates and stores the JavaScript & CSS files for each page individually in a directory, only to be called upon when that page is visited.

Using Sapper

Sapper not only offers the features described earlier but provides much more by default, eliminating the need for any additional libraries. Developers who’d alternately prefer page-routing by implementing a routing strategy can use Svelte, for all others Sapper has your back.

What’s the foreseeable future for Sapper?

Sapper is a young platform and has a lot to learn that said, it’s very intuitive and simple to use. Page-routing in Sapper is easy even for beginners, API creation is fairly simple, SSR implementation is straightforward, etc.

There is a lot to expect from such a platform in the future. To say the least, features implemented in Sapper are well put together and are valuable, but it is better to use them in Sapper, rather than trying to clone them in Svelte.

At AVI Web Solutions we aim to continuously innovate and create higher value for our clients by offering them the best and precise solution to their problems. We’ll help you achieve your end goal with our in-house technical expertise and ensure that the final delivery is at par with your expectations.