haunted VS rocket

Web component browser APIs aren't that many, and not that hard to grasp (if you don't know about them, have a look at Google's Learn HTML section and MDN's Web Components guide); but creating a web component actually requires taking care of many small things. This is where web component libraries come in very handy, freeing us of having to think about some of those things by taking care of them for us. Most of the things I'll mention here are handled one way of another by other libraries (GitHub's Catalyst, Haunted, Hybrids, Salesforce's LWC, Slim.JS, Ionic's Stencil) but I'll focus on Google's Lit and Microsoft's FAST here as they probably are the most used web component libraries out there (ok, I lied, Lit definitely is, FAST not that much, far behind Lit and Stencil; but Lit and FAST have many things in common, starting with the fact that they are just native web components, contrary to Stencil that compiles to a web component). Both Lit and FAST leverage TypeScript decorators to simplify the code even further so I'll use that in examples, even though they can also be used in pure JS (decorators are coming to JS soon BTW). I'll also leave the most apparent yet most complex aspect for the end.

Haunted on GitHub: github.com/matthewp/haunted

Atomico and Haunted, to add the useController hook which underlies useQuery and co.

** WCs don't have to be classes. See matthewp/haunted which uses hooks like React. But that library is not a mixin or wrapper around lit-element; it would replace lit-element. It does use lit-html though.

I think the distaste many folks have for web components stems from a simple misunderstanding. The APIs collectively know as "web components" weren't intended to replace your favorite framework. As with most things that become part of the standard, these are lower level APIs that will be supported for a long, long time. They were given to us with the hope that we'd build great tools around them, which we have with Stencil, lit-element, hybrids, Haunted, and so many more.

Rocket is a tool used for creating web pages and it is fabulous for generating static content starting from markdown files. One of the cool thing about Rocket is the fact that web components and javascript can be used inside the markdown files. ​ Creating a project with Rocket is quite straightforward, you can take a look at the documentation or if you like to learn by looking at examples, you can find good ones in the Rocket’s GitHub repository . ​ This guide is created for getting you started with Rocket and FicusJS. FicusJS is a set of lightweight functions for developing applications using web components. ​ Using the Create Ficus App CLI you can quickly scaffold a project that contains a basic structure for working with Rocket and FicusJS. ​ The project will contain:

Another kind of problem we ran into is some dependencies having undeclared dependencies. When using yarn it was not a problem because those undeclared dependencies are sometimes very used. For example, after the migration we realized mdjs-core had not declared its dependency on slash.

Rocket is an SSG that allows seamless integration of Markdown and WebComponents. There is a project to support the development of web standard technologies called Modern Web, and rocket is a subproject of that project. Other sub-projects are test runner and development server, modern-web for development server, and open-wc for WebComponents development, testing, and linter.

The docs also got a major upgrade care of Pascal Schilp's untiring work in the Webcomponents Community Group to get the custom elements manifest v1 published. This latest iteration of the API docs generates package manifests directly from source code, and converts them to API docs via Rocket.

My daily workflow is hugely dominated by JavaScript, so it was only natural to want to stay in the same environment if I could reach my earlier requirements with it. On top of this, the end goal is to integrate it within a bigger WIP system called Rocket which is node-based so therefore it will need to at least support NodeJS. Having it standalone (usable via npx) also makes it more versatile and easier to maintain/test.