panel VS lit

Webcomponents will outlive React 13, mostly likely. Will they outlive React entirely or its cousins like Solid and Svelte? Perhaps not.

Webcomponents and React look like they solve the same problem but they do not.

Webcomponent api is pretty shallow. You get connected/disconnnected/attributeChanged call back but gotta write your own property setter and getters, and that’s mostly it. Shadow dom becomes a pain to work with if something needs to pierce it. Can’t pass nested objects in attributes, gotta encode as string.

Mixpanel went all in on webcomponents, but had to build a whole bunch of lib tooling around it. They made their own framework on top of webcomponents. https://github.com/mixpanel/panel

Worked on panel lib and webcomponent UI for many years. It is not a silver bullet.

The issue with webcomponents is there are a ton of libraries that fill in the missing gaps. There’s not a lot you can do with pure vanilla webcomponent api since browsers don’t provide efficient dom updating mechanism. Google has their own thing, Microsoft had multiple internal libs across orgs, Reddit does their own thing.

The most standard thing for frontend with wide adoption right now is React.

So the way I see it, is that React has already outlived webcomponents.

This course focused on Web Components via Lit. I think we spent a single week (two classes) learning the foundations of web development. Never taught us a single line of HTML, told us to google CSS, and spent that first week showing us what JavaScript does. Personally wish we spent some more time understanding the foundations, but even if I don't know exactly what I am doing... I have been able to accomplish some great stuff.

That is the reason why I experiment with the TiniJS framework for a while. It is a collection of tools for developing web/desktop/mobile apps using the native Web Component technology, based on the Lit library. Thank you the Lit team for creating a great tool assists us working with standard Web Component easier.

https://github.com/lit/lit/tree/main/packages/labs/virtualiz...

actually, looking at it (https://lit.dev/), i do exactly that.

I also define a `render()` and extend my own parent, which does a `replaceChildren()` with the render. And, strangely, I also call the processor `html`

I'll still stick with mine however, my 'framework' is half-page of code. I dislike dependencies greatly. I'd need to be saving thousand+ lines at least.

Here, I don't want a build system to make a website; that's mad. So I don't want lit. I want the 5 lines it takes to invoke a dom parser, and the 5 lines it takes do define a webcomp parent.

I rather like https://lit.dev/ for web components so far.

For the reactivity stuff, you might want to read https://frontendmasters.com/blog/vanilla-javascript-reactivi... - it shows a bunch of no-library-required patterns that, while in a number of cases I'd much rather use a library myself, all seems at least -basically- reasonable to me and will probably be far more comprehensible to you than whatever I'd reach for, and frameworks are always much more pleasant to approach after you've already done a bunch of stuff by banging rocks together first.

I work on Lit, which I would hesitate to call a framework, but gives a framework-like DX for building web components, while trying to keep opinions to a minimum and lock-in as low as possible.

It's got reactivity, declarative templates, great performance, SSR, TypeScript support, native CSS encapsulation, context, tasks, and more.

It's used to build Material Design, settings and devtools UIs for Chrome, some UI for Firefox, Reddit, Photoshop Web...

https://lit.dev if you're interested.

I am more a fan of the augmented style because it doesn't entrap you in dev lock-in to platforms.

The problem with frameworks, especially web frameworks, is they reimplement many items that are standard now (shadowdom, components, storage, templating, base libraries, class/async, network/realtime etc).

If you like the component style of other frameworks but want to use Web Components, Google Lit is quite nice.

Google Lit is like a combination of HTML Web Components and React/Vue style components. The great part is it is build on Web Components underneath.

[1] https://lit.dev/

From the comments I see here, it seems like people expect the Webcomponents API to be a complete replacement for a JS framework. The thing is, our frameworks should start making use of modern web APIs, so the frameworks will have to do less themselves, so can be smaller. Lit [0] for example is doing this. Using Lit is very similar to using React. Some things work different, and you have to get used to some web component specific things, but once you get it, I think it's way more pleasant to work with than React. It feels more natural, native, less framework-specific.

For state management, I created LitState [1], a tiny library (really only 258 lines), which integrates nicely with Lit, and which makes state management between multiple components very easy. It's much easier than the Redux/flux workflows found in React.

So my experience with this is that it's much nicer to work with, and that the libraries are way smaller.

[0] https://lit.dev/