vscode-webview-ui-toolkit VS custom-elements-everywhere

Visual Studio Code has a set of web components designed for writing custom extension UIs that fit with the core VSCode UI - https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-webview-ui-toolkit - and explicitly mentions that being usable in multiple frameworks is one of the reasons for choosing web components as an implementation tech.

It ships React components that act as adaptors for them out of the box.

In VSCode, this is very easy to achieve, thanks to the VSCode Webview UI Toolkit. It’s a set of web components, provided by Microsoft, that are designed to look good and be used in VSCode webviews.

This problem was a bit complicated earlier, but with the release of the official vscode ui library vscode-webview-ui-toolkit, and the recent release of the default integration with react, the problem has become much simpler -- not perfect, of course.

Webview UI Toolkit repo

With React (it seems) finally moving to support everything needed (they are the last major framework lagging behind substantially), too, we might be moving to a world post-framework discussions, and real interoperability on a technical level. I think Jake Lazaroff motivates this beautifully with his articles “Web Components Eliminate JavaScript Framework Lock-in” and “The Web Component Success Story”.

Seems it doesn’t work in React, everything is sent as a string. There was a link in the article that shows how well web components work with various frameworks.

https://custom-elements-everywhere.com/

You can see how React fares for itself.

React supports Web Components, just some quirks to be aware of: https://custom-elements-everywhere.com/

You could wrap each component as a Web Component and then import them for each repo. Web Components are not native to frameworks, so the support for them could vary when passing props. Or you could wrap the render method of each framework as a function and then use the receiving frameworks life cycle method and inject it onto the page. If you use frameworks like Svelte or Lit that are "Web Component" based, then you'd need to see if the receiving framework supports Web Components inorder to import the seamlessly.

Check compatibility of React with web components: https://custom-elements-everywhere.com/ It's not directly because of jsx, but because of synthetic "let's make it up" approach of React.

I have been using this approach recently as well, working great thus far ! Some things to consider though: - I would recommend checking if the other frameworks you intend to use have good web components support (looking at you, react): https://custom-elements-everywhere.com/ - There are ways to do so without web components, but I wouldn't recommend them unless your framework has poor web components support.

VueJS actually fails some advanced tests for WebComponents: https://custom-elements-everywhere.com/

So, VueJS docs are actually incorrect when they say it scores 100%. The actual score is 90%.

I had reported this 8 months ago.

Since Web Components are supported natively by browsers, they can be used in any libraries and frameworks either directly or with configurations. https://custom-elements-everywhere.com/ is a great site to check custom elements support status by different libraries and frameworks.