lwc VS spectrum-web-components

Actually I was wondering if lwc oss is still a thing. The website lwc.dev looks like it hasn't been updated since the release in 2019. Are many people using it or was it a nice try by Salesforce but can we consider it dead? I know of course it can't compete with react, vue or angular, but has it built a nice user base around it to keep it interesting?

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.

Now in Alba’s role, she and her team use Lightning Web Components (LWC) to create custom user interfaces, a framework based on Web Components standards. With LWC, Alba creates components using modern, standard JavaScript. This means the skills that she learned previously are transferable to other JavaScript-based technologies. She pointed out that on top of this transferability, LWC is open source, and developers can use it outside of the Salesforce platform. Components can be used in Lightning App Builder and published on the AppExchange for other customers to use them.

Lightning Web Components (LWC) from Salesforce are based on standard Web Components built using HTML and JavaScript. They are lightweight, easy to build, and perform well in modern browsers. When building LWCs, you’ll become familiar with the concept of composition: piecing together simple building-block components within the body of a more complex component.

Indeed. Ever built anything in LWR+LWC opensource? It's opensource where you don't get to open its source. Most of the documentation is a mess between outdated Aura components and their new lwc.dev site which has like 2% of the material you actually need.

If you want to use LWC outside of Salesforce to build a website, check out LWC OSS

Salesforce developed Lightning Web Components (LWC) as a fast, enterprise-grade wrapper around vanilla web components. LWC is built on the same HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that powers the web, so any analyzer for those languages can be applied here.

For example, all the following design systems can be used without tooling (some of them provide ready-to-use bundles, others can be used through import maps): Google's Material Web, Microsoft's Fluent UI, IBM's Carbon, Adobe's Spectrum, Nordhealth's Nord, Shoelace, etc.

sp- (Spectrum components from Adobe6)

Spectrum web components by Adobe is really mature design system that makes a lot of usage of Lit Elements. Their testing setup uses the suggested web test runner. Lit's documentation on testing suggests using that library.

In Fable.Lit rather than building an F# DSL (we tried) we use a string-based alternative which is closed to the HTML you know and love, this also helps a lot when you have to consume web components like those from shoelace.style, fast.design, adobe spectrum components, and more, this will be a very important and big point over the next few years now that web components have taken off finally with major companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, Github, Adobe and more are using them.

Oh hey, that me! We at Adobe are investing heavily in web editors built with web component technology. Not just Photoshop, but Illustrator, Lightroom, and a number of brand new or in development applications across the company, as well.

We’re also leveraging web components to support interoperability of our design system across teams who still choose to use frameworks or have been using them all this time. In this way we ship https://opensource.adobe.com/spectrum-web-components/ and teams like fonts.adobe.com that have a long standing Angular app, or edex.adobe.com with their long standing Vue app or various recent acquisitions with their own technical decisions, can all consume Spectrum design without shipping their own implementation or rewriting their app to another stack.

The ease of building at depth scale for large applications and at breadth scale for applications no matter their architectural decisions has been a huge win for Adobe and our goals to drive consistency and quality across the company. The speed and scope at which we’ve been able to do so just wouldn’t be possible without web components.

Recently, I had the opportunity to discuss the difficulties, learnings, and victories or developing Spectrum Web Components together with fellow custom element developers from teams at IBM, ING, SAP, and Vaadin. If you missed the live stream, check out the recording! Fellow panelist, Ari Gilmore, made a great point that there is a lack of reading material for developers like ourselves to draw from when looking to build solid accessibility practices into the web components space. With that in mind, I thought it would be a good idea to take some of the abstract concepts we discussed in the panel and share some actual examples of working and testable code. Hopefully, this can better support the next developer(s) looking to bring a high-quality, accessible, design system to life for their team via web components.

Their repos are public: - https://github.com/adobe/spectrum-web-components - https://github.com/adobe/react-spectrum

It does seem like I enjoy a good . I mean, look, I wrote about them all the way back in 2018 in ing in Some Tips, and then in 2020, I spoke about Stacked Slots at a virtual Web Components SF meetup (see the associated slides), before sharing a proof of concept for Light DOM as Model. And, as if that weren't enough, here we are again, and I'm writing to you, friend, about s. Today, we're going to get out of the theoretical and into the practical as we start on the path towards actual usage of Stacked Slots that I'm excited to bring to life as part of Adobe's Spectrum Web Components to support the delivery of Spectrum design's Help Text pattern.