Very interesting. How would you say it compares to mithril.js?
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I 'invented' the concept for this back in 2011, and it was used (as a proprietary lib) in various startups. Even though many similar open source libs have been released since, and boy have I tried a lot of them, none have been able to capture the elegance and DX of what we had back then. I might be biased though. :-)
So I started creating a cleaned-up, modern, TypeScript, open source implementation for the concept about five years ago. After many iterations, working on the project on and off, I'm finally happy with its API and the developer experience it offers. I'm calling it 1.0!
The concept: It uses many small, anonymous functions for emitting DOM elements, and automatically reruns them when their underlying proxied data changes. This proxied data can be anything from simple values to complex, typed, and deeply nested data structures.
As I'm currently free to spend my time on labors of love like this, I'm planning to expand the ecosystem around this to include synchronizing data with a remote server/database, and to make CRUD apps very rapid and perhaps even pleasurable to implement.
I've celebrated 1.0 by creating a tutorial with editable interactive examples! https://aberdeenjs.org/Tutorial/
I would love to hear your feedback. The first few people to actually give Aberdeen a shot can expect fanatical support from me! :-)
As far as I can tell, the main difference is this uses proxies to trigger side effects as opposed to virtual dom diffing. Perf wise, I like that people are pushing the boundaries, but also obviously React is still very popular and that indicates that its level of performance is good enough for a lot of devs </shrug>.
In terms of features:
- This was already pointed out in another comment, Aberdeen doesn't seem to be JSX compatible, but it supports similar hyperscript-like syntax (e.g. $('div.foo:hi') vs m('.foo', 'hi'))
- Unclear what the level of support is for various features that exist in Mithril. e.g. Router appears to be an add-on/example, and I don't see anything about HTTP request utils or SVG/MathML. Mithril is meant to be sort of a one-stop shop for SPAs; it could just be that the focus of the two libraries is slightly different, and that's ok if that's the case.
- Mithril has hooks to access the raw DOM and uses RAF for batching, it's not clear to me how integration w/ other DOM-touching libs (e.g. dragula) would work here.
I like the idea of using proxies as a way of implementing reactivity in principle, and I even played around with that idea. IME, there were a couple of things that made it problematic w/ POJO models IMHO. The first is that proxies are not friendly to console.log debugging, and the second is that implementing reactivity in collections (Map/Set/Weak*) was getting a bit too complex for my minimalist tastes.
Indeed, the main difference with Aberdee is in the way change tracking and updates are handled. This is actually a pretty significant, both in terms of internals and in the way you use the framework.
Fun fact: I once created a another library (for educational purposes) that's a lot more similar to mithril (though not as fully featured): https://www.npmjs.com/package/glasgow
As I said, I'm a fan of mithril's batteries-included approach. The router is part of Aberdeen, but not imported by default. SVG support is on my todo-list. And I'll be exploring nice ways to integrate with some backends.
Aberdeen allows (but discourages) you to access the raw DOM as well (through `getParentElement()`), as long as you don't detach/move nodes it created.
I don't know and can't find what you mean by RAF batching. Aberdeen batches all updates (using a setTimeout 0), and then reruns all dirty scopes in the order that they were created. That also means that parent-scopes go before child-scopes, cancelling the need for separately updating the latter.
It seems that console.log debugging of proxied objects works pretty well (now, in Chrome at least). It shows that it's a proxied object, and it shows the contents, without subscribing, which is usually what you'd want for debugging. If you do want to subscribe, a `console.log({...myObj})` does the trick. Or use `clone()` (provided by Aberdeen) for recursively subscribing to deep data structures.
I apparently have the same minimalist taste, having recently removed Map support to simplify things. :-) I'll probably have another go at adding Map/Set/Weak* once I figure out how to do it without with a tiny amount of code. :-)