panel VS uibuilder

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 looks bad. I see custom syntax, and JavaScript embedded into HTML in a way that cannot be syntax-checked at build time.

If you want a lightweight framework check out UIBuilder instead: https://github.com/wisercoder/uibuilder

Same JSX syntax as React, but this lib is very simple -- just over 200 lines of source code.

If you don't need Virtual DOM then Web Components are a great idea for building reusable components that work with all frameworks, including React. You can even use JSX to build Web Components: https://github.com/wisercoder/uibuilder