stencil VS turbo

First a disclosure: I never actually used Stencil, only played with it a bit locally in a hello-world project while writing this post.

This is my main concern too.

I don't understand why tools like this "pick a winner" with a specific framework instead of rendering to Web Components with a framework wrapper, or using something like Stencil[1] that can render to any framework.

[1] https://stenciljs.com/

I was recently able to sit down with some of the core members of Ionic, who also created Stencil a toolchain for building Design Systems and Progressive Web Apps. We talked at great length how typically companies are approaching Ionic from a Design Team and need help building components. As a developer I wanted to talk about the Web Components that are used within the Design System first. There was a decent amount of surprise, so I thought I would break down what a Design System is and why it doesn't matter which end you start with, as long as you have both your Design and Development teams working together to build your Design System.

Examples like this bug me. The React example is using a high level abstraction, the web component is directly using the API. A more accurate example would show how those React calls eventually boil down to document.createElement()

I don’t think the Web Components API was meant to be used directly all the time. You can use a framework like StencilJS:

https://stenciljs.com/

You might say that this is the same vicious cycle as JavaScript frameworks. That's wrong, because Web Components are interoperable by design. Choosing Stencil or Lit or any other library is a development convenience that has little to do with the interoperability of the resulting components.

I guess my problem is more specific to my overall architecture. I have components that when are placed in the DOM, have props rendered on them by their parent elements. I'm using stencil to do this.

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.

I also recommend checking out the docs for Stimulus and Turbo to familiarise yourself with all their features and the APIs used in this series.

In the above snippet, this refers to StreamElement, which is the custom element underpinning . The templateContent getter is defined by this element.

https://github.com/hotwired/turbo

Turbo 8 remove typescript without using JSDOC

Experiment using Turbo to drive front-end behavior: "Turbo 7.2.0 (currently in beta) allows you to define your own Stream actions which can be any JS code you want. By combining a custom Stream action or two with web components, you can essentially drive reactive frontend behavior from the backend stupidly easily. Loooove it! 😍 […] For a turnkey example, you could check out https://github.com/hopsoft/turbo_ready " —Jared White on The Spicy Web Discord

This handles disconnection (as could be done by any destructive change to the DOM, like navigating with Turbo or htmx, I'm not even talking about using the element in a JavaScript-heavy web app) but not reconnection though, and we've exited early from the connectedCallback to avoid initializing the element twice, so this change actually broke our component in these situations where it's moved around, or stashed and then reinserted. To fix that, we need to always call addSparkles in connectedCallback, so move all the rest into an if, that's actually as simple as that… except that when the user prefers reduced motion, sparkles are never removed, so they keep piling in each time the element is connected again. One way to handle that, without introducing our housekeeping of individual timers, is to just remove all sparkles on disconnection. Either that or conditionally add them in connectedCallback if either we're initializing the element (including attaching the shadow DOM) or the user doesn't prefer reduced motion. The difference between both approaches is in whether we want the small animation when the sparkles appear (and appearing at new random locations). I went with the latter.

If you think you have seen enough Rails magic, you are mistaken my friend. Rails have a new trick up its sleeve: Hotwire. And with the magical Turbo tool that comes with it, you can create modern, interactive web applications with minimal, or sometimes no JavaScript at all, providing users with an incredibly smooth experience.

There is also Turbo and the frameworks who adopt them, Ruby on Rails, PHP Symphony and possibly others that solves the same issue in the same manner as HTMX. And the choice for HTMX is only a personal taste in this, but you should definitely learn about this, this is as cool as HTMX!

Most controversially, the Turbo framework dropped TypeScript support altogether after assessing that strong typing was the culprit behind poor developer experience.

You can find a demo video and more information here: https://github.com/hotwired/turbo/pull/1019