pianojacq VS uhtml

As someone who does this too: it depends. If you take time out every now and then to completely refactor your code base it can actually be surprisingly effective. I've done exactly that on my last project and I'm pretty happy with the end result, you can have a look for yourself:

https://gitlab.com/jmattheij/pianojacq/-/tree/master/js

This project will likely never be finished, there are always nice new things to add or requests from people, there is no commercial pressure because it is a hobby project and I don't have a boss to answer to. And even if such refactoring operations take me two weeks or more (this one I did while I was mostly just working on a laptop without access to a keyboard so it was sometimes tricky to ensure that nothing broke) in the end it is worth it to me because I am also paying the price for maintaining the code and if it is messy then I would stop working on it.

The project moves forward in fits and starts, sometimes I work on it for weeks on end and sometimes it is dormant for months. In a commercial setting or in a much larger team I don't think this approach would work.

Two things:

- adding interactivity to a web page vs building an application. Those are not the same thing, and what you read applies to the first

- there's a widely accepted belief that vanilla js is not suitable to build apps. I don't buy in this belief. I have a built networked Scrabble game written in vanilla js. Both the backend and the frontend. This simplicity allowed external contributors not well versed in the modern web stack to contribute. I also was able to enter the code of Pianojacq (from jaquesm) [1] and contribute quite easily because he also chose vanilla js. This simplicity is very valuable, and lost with modern framework, and nobody is really concerned about this.

I've done some React development, so I know my way in a modern app. I've also contributed to a frontend written in Vue. I think they solve problems but bring complexity to the table, in particular the tooling (bundlers, minifiers, etc), the dependencies and the debugging being much harder.

It seems DOM manipulation through native browser API scares many people, but when it's what you are familiar with, your usual "framework", it's manageable. You need to be disciplined to avoid things getting messy (a discipline frameworks partially enforce), but I really believe you can go far with vanilla js.

I believe React & Co are often picked to ease beginners' contribution, but they actually do require expertise. I'd rather touch vanilla js code from a beginner or an experienced developer than a React code from a beginner.

It's a matter of taste. Vanilla JS has the taste of fresh air to me. It's zen. You write the code and it runs. No tools, no slow compilation, no minification that complexifies the debugging. Minification which is only useful because with those framework you bundle an awful quantity of code in the first place. Yes, source maps exists but they don't do everything.

But today you won't have access to the whole ecosystem of existing React components with vanilla JS. It might be a curse or a benediction.

[1] https://gitlab.com/jmattheij/pianojacq

As for 1) yes, I can do that, the reason it is set where it is right now is because very soft keypresses on real pianos with sensorbars installed are typically fingers brushing keys on the way to other keys and these false triggers leave a lot of errors that aren't really errors. I'll make that setting configurable.

2) yes, if you look in the 'midi' directory on the gitlab site ( https://gitlab.com/jmattheij/pianojacq/-/tree/master/midi , but also linked from the application) there are whole bunch of them that all should work well

I have to say that I am an extremist minimalist, so I use a nano-framework I developed for the frontend, with uhtml (https://github.com/WebReflection/uhtml) and some JavaScript libraries to help.

One of the main decisions I had to make early on was template handling, there are many approaches out there and of course, with React being the king, I first tried implementing a VirtualDOM complete with JSX support and whatnot... well that didn't really worked for what I was trying to achieve, so I moved into Tagged Template Literals (through µhtml) and tried to stick to standards as much as possible by building on top of the Custom Elements API.

FAST rendering thanks to µhtml

Challenge: With declarative rendering, oftentimes entire DOM trees are re-painted because of simple prop or state changes that could have been handled faster by imperative DOM manipulation. I wanted a framework that, like Lit, only updated content or attributes that had changed instead of re-painting entire DOM elements and trees. Solution: I chose µhtml for the default templating system because it accomplishes this goal and other advanced templating features in a tiny bundle size. To make rendering even faster and smoother, I throttled uhtml's rendering using requestAnimationFrame.

> There are lighter-weight shadow dom frameworks out there (than Vue/React/Angular) so why would you want to write one yourself?

You can even avoid a shadow DOM entirely:

https://github.com/WebReflection/domdiff

https://github.com/WebReflection/uhtml

My next goal would be to discard snabbdom (and virtualdom) and use custom elements. For that I'm evaluating a library like https://github.com/WebReflection/uhtml and all it's ecosystem of utility

Yep ditched React since 2015, it's still the same mess today. They all not trying to encourage interoperability, and comes with their own build .. seriously? Frontend should be just libs! Use https://github.com/WebReflection/uhtml or lit-html where things should be highly dynamic.

If it's for getting into job market, go for React. If it's for learning declarative ui, build cool stuff real quick without tooling, go with lit-html or bravely go with https://github.com/WebReflection/uhtml (it's more simple than anything else, yet powerful)

A tiny dom lib like https://github.com/WebReflection/uhtml is more than enough for very complicated UI, with understanding how events work, will be able to implement very thin state management on top. With game programming styled manual render() call here and there as needed, pretty neat.