CalDOM VS htm

Introducing CalDOM, an agnostic, reactive & minimalist (3kb) JavaScript UI library with direct access to native DOM.

Instead of pulling you into a library-specific magical world, CalDOM let you fully access the DOM directly while keeping the reactivity. A 2-in-1 virtual-DOM & no-virtual-DOM approach if you will.

So you could take full advantage of native APIs & mix it with other libraries to gain superior performance & flexibility in the development process.

CalDOM does not require any dependency or tooling. It does not introduce any new syntax. Just pure JS.

This is the first time I’m publishing something like this. This was a simple jQuery alternative I made myself years ago & kept on improving it slowly. Worked really hard during the last few months to add reactivity and get it to this level.

Please check it out & let me know what you think, the good, bad & your suggestions to improve it.

Also, it's great if you could contribute to the project: https://github.com/dumijay/CalDom

Also, need your help to make it more awesome :) https://github.com/dumijay/CalDom

It's great if you could contribute to the project. It's open-source (MIT licenced) & available on GitHub.

The preact team also dislikes transpiling jsx so they've developed an alternative using tagged template literals: https://github.com/developit/htm

So getting this to work without bundler magic is very hard. It's not surprising why NextJS is investing in a bundler. Though one thing that really sticks out is how much complexity we add for just miniscule dev ergonomics. Not using JSX and using something like htm would make all this easier (removing the bundler entirely), it's a lot of overhead to avoid a couple of quotes. React should really have a tagged-template mode. Also all of this is indirection is actually bad for dev ergonomics too! One of the reasons I did this is because I'm absolutely sick of magic caches and sorting through code that's been crushed by a bundler into something I don't recognize and can't easily debug. While we can't get rid of this completely (ts/jsx) this preserves the module import graph completely on the client-side making it easy to find things as you are working and preserving line numbers. This obviously is not useful for a production build and there's a lot of work that would need to go in to support both modes over the same code, but it's depressing no tools really work like this for local development.

You can also do JSX and skip the build step with preact + htm : https://github.com/developit/htm#example

While I was able to achieve this fairly easily, the developer experience of manually stitching strings together wasnt great. Being myself a fan of buildless libraries, such as htm and lit-html, I figured I'd try to take a stab at implementing a DSL for component-like templating in Service Workers myself, called Service Worker Templating Language (SWTL), here's what it looks like:

I would however highly recommend https://github.com/developit/htm

I thought the same thing, but apparently "HTM" is a JSX like javascript string template representation of HTML, and it can be found here: https://github.com/developit/htm

If you're going to do a no-build approach, assume modern JS (so you don't have to transpile the JS syntax). Also, you can use https://github.com/developit/htm as a nearly-identical equivalent to JSX syntax, also without transpiling.

This seems like a case of caring way too much about something that's hardly very different. JSX versus tagged template strings can be incredibly similar to one another.

The examples in this article are using vanilla template strings to author raw html, but that only misses a couple of nicities JSX has. There are tagged template string libraries like htm[1] that do include some of the few nicities JSX has, but which are actually compatible with the official language.

[1] https://github.com/developit/htm

The first one exists in JavaScript and is called Tagged Template Literals. I agree with the author that its a nice feature. It's the perfect construct to use for prepared SQL statements, LINQ-style queries, or reimplementing a JSX-like syntax (see HTM https://github.com/developit/htm).

There is however a library that is closer to JSX (HTML-like feel) but yet does not require a build step. htm. HTM uses tagged templates to leverage template literal as native Javascript template strings. If you have not played with tagged templates, I encourage you to check this out, it's a quite powerful feature, that has recently become a part of Javascript.