cssui VS stimulus-use

Thus, we love anything that simplifies using it or, better yet, eliminates JS. That’s why we use tools like CSSUI on this Drupal site. And never us JS when it’s not necessary. In other words, we use HTML and CSS as you should.

But we are not fans of JavaScript, especially for UI components. For a review of its clusterfuckiry see our article on Frontend Madness. Thus, we love anything that simplifies or better yet eliminates JS. That’s why we use tools like CSSUI on this Drupal site.

CSSUI promises pure CSS interactive components without any Javascript at all. We use it on Symfony Station via asset injecting it into Drupal. It doesn’t have everything, but it has many things you need. Start with this!

The very first release v0.1.0 was published a week ago but many other updates will follow.

You can see that I added a dependency here: stimulus-use.

“stimulus-use: Add composable behaviors to your Stimulus controllers, like debouncing, detecting outside clicks and many other things.

Actually, Stimulus is pretty cool because you can compose multiple pre-built behaviors into one Stimulus controller, for a sort of functional approach to component behaviors. The tradeoff is that a growing web of Stimulus controllers (plus HTML data attributes associated with them) can become complex and hard to understand.

The stimulus-use project is a collection of reusable behaviors for Stimulus. If you are familiar with React, this project is similar to React’s hooks system, but for Stimulus controllers.

To make using the IntersectionObserver API easier, we will add the wonderful stimulus-use package to our application. This is not a requirement, but it does simplify the code a bit.

Finally, as we recently added the Stimulus-Use library to our project, we made sure to upgrade it to current beta which supports Stimulus 3.

As you’ll see below, I am importing useClickOutside from stimulus-use, it’s a great library with small, composable helpers, I urge you to check it out!

For example, we have a few ”live search“ fields, backed by back-end Fetch requests, on some pages. The live search function was usually triggered by the keyup event and Cuprite was such a fast typewriter that it frequently sent multiple requests almost at once. If some of the responses got a bit late or out of sync, the front-end JavaScript code began hitting issues. We solved this by adopting a technique called debouncing and, frankly, we should have done this since the beginning. By the way, we used the useDebounce module from the marvelous Stimulus-use library to achieve this.